#66. Arlene's Questions

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"Arlene in Islamabad" sent an especially helpful comment on post #64 (Ritual's Biological Roots). It came in after #65 (Ritual's Cosmic Roots) had been published, so I added it to the comments for #65.

She said: "It’s exciting and wonderful to realize that our spirit doesn’t separate us from our animal relatives, and also that religious ritual, our own participation in the cosmic process, has its roots in their behavior. 

It’s such a new thought, so exciting and welcome, that it’s almost hard to believe. But the proof is there. This post is a gift; thanks very much."

Arlene has lived in Pakistan for many years, but she was in the first high school chemistry class I ever taught, back in Delran, New Jersey, more than 50 years ago. I sent her a note of thanks for the comment and asked if she might share more of her thoughts along those lines.

She did. In the note that follows she describes some of her personal experiences in Pakistan and asks some especially important questions about evolution and ritual.

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Sam: Much of what crossed my mind as I read post 64 is personal and of no interest to the readers of your blog, probably not 'along those lines' as you asked for. I still pass it along for your information, though I do hope to get answers to my some of my questions.

I have loved the concept of evolution since you taught it to us in high school. I live in a country that has the only five-hundred-million-year unbroken fossil record in the world. Before the current violence in Pakistan, scientists, professors and doctoral students from Europe and North America used to come here every winter to do research. I was lucky enough once to go along with them for a few days.

I tagged behind the scientists wherever they went, and found that I could follow nearly all their discussion. I held in my hands fossils of every sort, from a glistening black mammoth tooth to fossilized bovid feces. There were piles of discarded fossils everywhere, and I was allowed to take whatever I wanted from them. It was the most fun I have ever had in my life, and in the van on the way home I remembered a question of Dr. Bernie Siegel in his book, Love, Medicine and Miracles: "Do you want to live to be a hundred?" My answer then was a resounding yes, with no if’s, and’s or but’s.

You said, “…the evolutionary perspectives of the New Cosmology-- where the emphasis is on our creative participation in the cosmic process-- we need a clear understanding of ritual's biological roots. It is ritual that empowers our participation in that evolutionary process.”

Does this actually mean that we are creatively participating in evolution when we perform a ritual?

Exactly how are we being creative? And how is what we are doing part of evolution? Is this the same evolution I am talking about above? Am I taking evolution too literally, too physically? I somehow doubt it, because the post is about biological roots of ritual. I hope my questions aren’t from a different ballpark, but somehow fear I’ve missed something important. It’s like it’s exciting, but I can’t exactly wrap my mind around it; I want to know much more about this. Thanks again. -arlene

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Arlene has provided me with three nice sets of questions-- all dealing with ritual, evolution and our creative participation in it-- that I would like to respond to.

I want first to say, "No, Arlene, you're not out of the ballpark and you're not taking evolution too literally." Cosmic evolution has three main stages-- matter, life and mind-- and it's important that we not limit our understanding of it only to its biological phase.

When we take into account the big picture, it's clear that "evolution" refers to the entire history of the universe. It includes not just the formation of stars and planets at the earlier physical-cosmic stage, and the origin and development of life on Earth at its biological stage, but also the emergence of self-aware consciousness at the human stage.

And at that human stage-- the level of "mind"-- evolution includes both the personal growth and development of each individual human being and also-- and especially, here-- the communal and cultural development of global humanity.

Because we're so close to it and so much a part of it, that cultural stage is much more difficult to see clearly than the others. It includes early developments like the invention of language and the use of fire, the creation of stone tools in Paleolithic times and the development of farming in the more recent Neolithic-agricultural period.

But what's most important for us to see here is that the cultural phase continues in our day. Evolution is still going on in things like advances in medicine, the development of communications systems like the Internet which link every part of the Earth, and the increasing sensitivity on the part of the whole human family to social issues.

When we see that very big picture, it's easier to see that a concern for environmental sustainability and issues like racial and gender equality are no less a part of the evolution of the universe than was the emergence of multicellular life-forms on the Earth a billion years ago and the formation of galaxies many billions of years earlier.

It's all one process.

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I know from my teaching experience that the idea of seeing humanity's cultural development as part of the evolution of the universe is tough for many to accept. It's not that it's objectionable so much as that it's simply unfamiliar.

Our western culture has conditioned us-- because of many centuries of religious dualism and the rationalism of early science-- to see ourselves as separate from the rest of reality.

But it's precisely this new self-understanding-- this new sense of human participation in the many-billion-years of the evolutionary process-- that's the very essence of the new cosmology. And what makes it so exciting.

Arlene expresses well that fundamental excitement so many feel when they first see themselves as part of the evolution of the universe. "It’s such a new thought," she says, "so exciting and welcome, that it’s almost hard to believe."

She is describing what recently has been called the "awakening of the impulse to evolve" and what Michael Dowd, in his book Thank God For Evolution, puts more simply when he says that it's what happens when people "get it."

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For me, one of the most important aspects of this new scientific understanding of our place in the universe is that it frees us to pursue spiritual growth without going along with those dualistic religious perspectives which insist that we humans are alien on the Earth and that "our true home in heaven."

It allows those who like to call themselves "spiritual, but not religious" to once again give themselves wholeheartedly to "the inner search" and the development of their "interiority." And this is quite literally a new self-understanding-- new in the story of science and new to humanity's recent religious history.

So, a big "yes" to Arlene. We are indeed talking about the same evolutionary process that you experienced first hand in the fossil fields of Pakistan.

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Arlene's second set of questions has to do with "exactly how," as she puts it, our human activity is part of that creative evolutionary process.

Once it becomes clear that evolution is a single process-- of matter, life and mind, each phase emerging from the previous one-- it then becomes obvious that we humans who are alive today are also part of it.

From the big picture, we can see that our very existence goes back-- through the evolution of life on Earth and the formation of our planet and the sun and our Milky Way galaxy-- to the primordial flaring forth of the Big Bang billions of years ago.

Once we "get" that big picture, it also becomes clear that our participation on the personal and cultural level of the process is no less creative than was the emergence of multicellular animals or the development of photosynthesis by plants at an earlier stage of the process.

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That creativity, which simply means "making something new," is the very essence of the cosmic process at every level of matter, life and mind.

The world isn't static and unchanging, as our grandparents and great-grandparents, and many generations before them, thought it was. Today, we need words like "complexity" and "emergence" to be clear about this idea of creativity.

We also need to see that it's not just scientific discoveries or medical advances that are creative. And that creativity isn't limited, as was once thought, to literature or music. The "creative arts" include anything and everything we humans do to make the world better.

When we see that big picture, we can even get a better sense of what "better" means! By looking at the direction of the evolutionary process, we can see the kinds of goals it values.

From every observation of the real world by anyone willing to observe it, as well as from modern science, we can see that the cosmic process values persons. It values personal relationships and community-- indeed, the whole cosmic community of "all our relations."

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So, working for improved health care for everyone is a creative activity. 
So is saving a forest or an island in the river from urban development. So, too, are our everyday efforts at recycling: taking out the trash is a creative contribution to the evolution of the universe.

But our lives are creative every time we come up with a new way to do something.

Creativity is highly personal as well as communal: it can be a more efficient way to sweep the kitchen floor, a new way to grow marigolds, a better way catch a baseball. For me, it can be an improvement in how I express my appreciation for someone, my attempts to learn how to communicate by way of iPhone and Facebook as well as by e-mail, my efforts to share my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion in a blog.

Whenever we do anything that contributes to the goals of the evolutionary process... whenever we encourage the growth and development of a young person... whenever we promote relationships, community, ecological sustainability, racial equality and social justice... whenever we do anything to help make the world better, we are creatively participating in the evolution of the universe.

Perhaps most important, however, is the thought that we especially contribute to the creative process whenever we take personal delight in anything: whenever we give our unique and personal "yes" to the cosmic process and all that it has produced. No one else, ever-- in the fourteen-billion-year history of the universe's evolution-- can do that.

So in the long run, just being alive and self-aware is "exactly how" we contribute to the creative process: by simply trying to be ourselves by our efforts to be who-and-what the evolutionary process-- via our genes and cultural background-- calls us to be. Our unique creative contribution to the evolution of the universe is ourselves.

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Arlene's other big question has to do with the connections between creativity and ritual.

In my post on Ritual's Biological Roots (#64), I said that ritual is humanity's age-old means for being empowered to participate in the cosmic process. Arlene asks, "Does this actually mean that we are creatively participating in evolution when we perform a ritual?"

"Well, yes, but don't limit creativity to ritual activity," is my response. 

As I was saying above, everything we do can be creative participation in the world's evolution.

Where, then, does ritual come in? It's the means we have for being personally empowered to participate creatively in the evolution of the universe. We can personally attune ourselves to the cosmic process-- we can become personally aligned with it-- via ritual.

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Our participation in ritual does this is by letting us shift our awareness. It lets us move away from being conscious by only the rational function of the mind-- the one which the scientific rationalism of an earlier age mistakenly thought our minds are limited to.

As I've repeatedly described in these posts, the human psyche is quaternary. It can function in four distinctly different ways. Rational cause-and-effect thinking is only one of them.

(Readers who are new to these ideas might want to look at some of my earlier posts where I've described this quaternary perspective. I've used Native American and Wicca imagery, for example, as well as Jungian terminology, Karl Rahner's experiential descriptions, and the especially rich expression of them found in the Wisdom literature of the Hebrew Bible.)

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By letting us shift gears away from the usual focus of our minds on details and cause-and-effect thinking, ritual allows us to enter into the experience of our openness and relatedness to all that is.

As I said in the post on Ritual's Psychological Roots (#65), "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 something like dark matter. We don't have any direct experience of most of the material of the universe, but we know it must exist. Astrophysicists say it something like 96% of the physical-material universe! In the same way, we know from a scientific perspective that we are unconscious of most of the patterns by which the cosmic process operates.

In ritual we activate the mind's Intuition function, linking our consciousness and the unconscious psyche. It's the bridge between our personal awareness and all else. It gives us access to the archetypal patterns and rhythms of the cosmic process which are within us but about which we remain mostly unconscious.

Ritual allows us to shift our minds to those conscious functions other than sensing and reasoning, so that we can become more perceptive of the whole picture and more aware of our relatedness to all reality.

And it's this openness to the archetypal patterns of the cosmic process that empowers us to be creative. When we are aligned with the creative process, we can make new things and do old things in new ways precisely because that's what the universe does.

I think what makes ritual seem so odd from a rationalist perspective is that in ritual we do things that have no practical purpose, and yet we get great benefit from them. I hope to describe some of those "useless" 
activities in a future post.

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When Arlene says about all this that "It’s such a new thought, so exciting and welcome, that it’s almost hard to believe," she is expressing precisely the essence of the excitement the new cosmology generates when people "get it."

It's truly a world-transformation awareness. And more and more people daily are, in fact, "getting it." We really are on the verge of a new, different and better world. And our human drive-- our urge or inclination or impulse-- to religious ritual has a significant place in it.

My thanks to Arlene for asking such good questions!

sam@macspeno.com 

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#62. "Let Us Attend"

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In the two previous posts I talked about the half-dozen words I think are needed to make sense of religious ritual in an evolutionary context: symbol, myth and meaning in post #60 and wisdom, cosmology and creativity in post #61.

It seems like an awful lot of words. I'd like to be able to say what I have to say with fewer, but I don't think I can. Some of the words are more familiar than others; some mean something different in an evolutionary context than they do in the old static-dualistic worldview; and some simply are words which our culture (western civilization, American society, Judeo-Christian tradition) doesn't use at all.

In this post, I'd going to try to put them together. For easier reading, I'll skip referring to the two previous posts, but do check back if it looks like I'm not being clear enough. And do keep in mind the complexity of the topic; trying to spell out an understanding of religious ritual in the context of cosmic evolution is an ambitious project!

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Although "cosmology" is a relatively unfamiliar word to most people, it's probably the easiest of my six words to understand. It's simply how any group of people (a society or culture) understands its place in the vast scheme of things. Of course it's also how the individuals within any group understand their place in the world. 

It's what people take for granted-- for the most part, unconsciously-- about the question "Where do we fit in?"

The old cosmology said we don't fit in. We're aliens, strangers in a strange land. Our home is in heaven, our task is to get there. And we can't do it without outside help.

For those who still accept the dualistic cosmology, religious rituals are actions and words with the power to help us escape from the world-- and from hell. For that reason, many who no longer accept the old cosmology have written off any need for what seems to them to be simply magical words or superstitious activities.

But humans need rites. Religious ritual is far older than the Judeo-Christian tradition, so even if we don't accept a dualistic understanding of the western world's religious tradition, we're still in need of rites. They're part of human nature.

Ritual even presents a problem, however, for many who do accept the New Cosmology. The influence of the reductionist perspectives of 19th-century science remains strong even into the 21st century, so that still today many have a difficult time seeing what value there might be to the meaningless words and archaic gestures to which ritual is reduced when seen only from a rationalistic view point.

As I've said many times in these posts, we need a bigger picture. In this case, the bigger picture we need is about the workings of our conscious minds.

I hope to offer some thoughts about the relationship between consciousness and ritual in the next post. But long-time readers will probably guess what my main point will be: that our conscious minds can operate in more than one way.

The bigger picture that we need here is that our conscious awareness is not limited only to logical reasoning. Just as many in our culture are unaware of having a cosmology-- even though they do-- so, too, do many remain unaware that consciousness itself can function in several different ways.

It's easy to see, then, why ritual is so misunderstood in our culture which claims to value rationality so highly. (From the news, however, of what politicians have been up to with the health care debate, for example, it's obvious that our society doesn't really value rationality all that much.)

My point is two-fold: that the New Cosmology also includes a bigger picture of the human psyche than the one the old cosmology assumed, and that ritual can be much better understood when we are aware of our minds as capable of far more than only rational thoughts.

We also have to keep in mind a bigger picture of the New Cosmology itself. The evolutionary worldview includes not just an understanding of the physical world of matter or the biological world of living things, but also-- and especially-- of the mental-psychological-social world of human technology and global culture.

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My second term, "Wisdom," refers to the biblical perspectives within the Judeo-Christian world which have remained little known even to devoted followers of those traditions. It's a three part perspective: non-static in its view of the cosmos, non-dualistic in its view of anthropos and non-patriarchal in its view of theos.

The essence of the Wisdom tradition is that it doesn't see the world as an evil from which we need to escape; it emphasizes, instead, the presence of the divine at the heart of a dynamic creation-- from the very beginning. As a reader said in commenting on post #61, "Wisdom fills the world with beauty and goodness."

Wisdom has no place in the old cosmology. In the New Cosmology, the divine, the human and cosmic come together. Wisdom and the New Cosmology coincide, and it's here that I see most clearly "the convergence of religion and science."

Recovering our roots in the world-- and, indeed, coming to awareness of our roots as the world become conscious of itself-- allows us to see that neither religious dualism with regard to the Earth nor the patriarchal domination and exploitation of the children of the Earth is acceptable in our day.

The Wisdom perspective emphasizes the role of all humanity in the world's continuing development beyond patriarchy and dualism. The whole New Testament is about that cultural transition; the gospels speak of it on every page.

The Wisdom perspective also helps us to have a better understanding of the very nature of the cosmic process itself. Just as we call the body's self-healing the "wisdom of the body," so we can understand that there is a "wisdom of the universe" oriented toward the healing and completeness of the whole world.

From the Wisdom perspective's practical point of view, our personal and communal growth beyond patriarchy and dualism is only half the story. The other half is actually living in communion with the cosmic healing process.

In this practical perspective, each of us can understand ourselves as a unique personal expression of the Mystery behind the universe and so as a free, co-creative participant in the world's evolution. Creativity is the key to our self-understanding.

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Surprisingly, "creativity" isn't so easy to talk about. It means "making newness," but even "newness" is an odd word in our culture. A clearer way to describe creativity might be something like "engaging in on-going transformation." (Which is, of course, what the wisdom of the universe is all about.)

In the old static context, the word "creation" was a noun which referred to what was or is now-- to all that has been created; and "creativity" in that perspective was a characteristic only of the Creator.

In contrast, "creation" in the New Cosmology is a verb. It refers to the on-going emergence of new and more complex things-- at the cosmic, biological and human levels. In this sense, "creation" is precisely what's meant by the word "evolution."

And it's precisely because we know ourselves in that evolutionary context as the universe become conscious of itself that we share-- both as individuals and in our communities-- in the creative activity of the cosmic process. We know ourselves as co-creative participants along with the creative Mystery behind the universe.

Obviously, this understanding of human creativity has no place in the old cosmology. There, we humans are only passive recipients of our life and existence.

And it's obviously this passivity that's promoted by patriarchal authorities. In our day, the abuse of authority by Christian priests and bishops, for example, has come to such clear light that no one can miss it. But creativity is no less suppressed in the secular world as well. Serious artists can hardly make a living, while "famous for being famous" celebrities make millions.

Closer to home, when school budgets get tight, the first thing to go is the art or music department. When the mayor of Philadelphia, a decent person, recently needed to save money he suggested closing many of the city's libraries.

It's easy to be negative. My main point is that in the non-static, non-dualistic and non-patriarchal perspectives of the New Cosmology, creativity is the central focus.

Creativity refers both to our personal efforts at transformation and to the on-going efforts of all human societies to make a better life for the Earth's children. The personal and communal come together best, in my view, in the understanding that we make the world better primarily by our own efforts at personal transformation.

Transformation is at the heart of the New Cosmology, and creative transformation--of our individual selves and our global human culture-- is the very meaning of our existence. On-going creative transformation is our "myth" in the most positive sense, and creativity is the very essence of our "meaning."

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Probably the most difficult of those six ritual-related words to be clear about are the two I used just above, "meaning" (how we understand things) and "myth" (how we express that understanding).

In the evolutionary context, "meaning" refers especially to our understanding of the patterns of the universe's workings and "myth" to our expression of those patterns.

All this is especially confusing because we call those expressions of our understanding by many different names. Besides "myths," we also talk about the "principles of science," the "laws of physics and chemistry," the "patterns of biological growth," the "wisdom of the body," the "functions of consciousness," and the "workings of the unconscious psyche," for example.

As "myths," they are not so much facts and ideas as they are expressions of the phenomenological apprehension of the designs inherent in the processes of nature. They are expressions of our experiences of the intelligible patterns of the world's workings at the various levels of matter, life and mind.

And all of these "myths" have to do with health and wholeness in the broadest sense. Whether we call them the rules of quantum physics, the principles of natural selection, or stories about stealing fire from the gods, they are all expressions of our experiences of the wholeness-making patterns of the evolutionary process.

Of course "myth" and "meaning" in the New Cosmology have to do especially with own human self-understanding; creativity is our meaning in that dynamic context.

In the New Cosmology, our efforts toward personal development and our social-communal efforts to make a better world-- in terms of justice, equality and ecology-- are the most central aspects of our own self-understanding.

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And this, finally, is where ritual comes in. Ritual empowers our efforts.

The essence of ritual is our intentionally plugging into the energies of the cosmic process for the purpose of our empowerment to participate in the evolutionary cosmos.

I have never been able to come up with a better phrase for describing ritual than "plugging into the energies of the cosmic process." But I can't say those words (and you probably can't hear them) without having in mind the image of the prongs of an electrical plug being inserted into a wall outlet.

Less mechanical-sounding phrases-- like "tuning into the cosmic process" or "aligning ourselves with the evolution of the world"-- just don't express as clearly the energizing and empowering effect of ritual.

The problem is that what we're talking about here is momentous: nothing less than those simple human actions by which we intentionally unite ourselves with the life-giving dynamis (pneuma, spiritus, breath, wisdom) of the universe. So it may just be too big a thought for anything more than a grossly mechanical image.

(However, if you have a suggestion for a better descriptive phrase than the mechanical-sounding "plugging into the energies of the universe," I would love to hear from you!)

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A reminder: What I'm trying to do here is to put together the six terms-- wisdom, cosmology, creativity, symbol, myth and meaning-- which we need to understand ritual in a evolutionary context. I think what best integrates all these complex ideas is our understanding of symbol.

The Greek word "sym-bol" literally means "puts together." Its opposite is "dia-bol," "pulls apart." The diabolic is whatever separates or alienates us from ourselves.

While in our culture the word "symbol" can also refer to the conventional designation of arbitrary markings to represent something-- the way we use "H₂O" and "water," for example, to represent water-- that's not what's meant here.

The symbols we use in ritual are those natural things, like water and fire, which grab our attention so powerfully that they don't let us not pay attention.

It's these natural symbols which unite our minds with the energies of the cosmic process. We use them in religious ritual precisely because, when we give them our conscious attention, they unite us-- "put us together"-- with our self-understanding.

So an accurate definition of ritual might be something like this: Ritual is using natural symbols to intentionally pay attention to the meaning of our existence.

Symbols aren't ideas; they are tools. They can put us back together, heal us, make us whole, and thus empower us to be co-creative participants in the cosmic process.

Our words "rite" and "ritual" are ancient names for using symbols in this way. "Rite" comes from the Sanskrit term rita, which refers to the rhythms of nature.

The early Indo-European speakers of Sanskrit obviously understood that we are consciously linked to the energies of the world when we give our attention to the round of the seasons, the cycles of nature, the patterns of the cosmic process.

And it works the same way today. The powerful effect our winter solstice rituals at Christmas time have on us is experienced by almost everyone. It's a good example of the fact that rituals are most powerful at transitional times in nature.

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These are, as I've been saying, complex thoughts. See if you think this three sentence summary works: Wisdom orders the cosmic process. Ritual is our plugging into its energies. Symbols let us do that.

I know of one even briefer summary. During the liturgical rituals in the Eastern churches, the deacon frequently cries out, "Wisdom! 
Let us attend!"

That puts it all together in just four words. We probably can't do better than that.

sam@macspeno.com

#24. Ontogenesis: Phases One & Two

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Whether we call our consciousness "neuro-gnosis," "psyche," "mind," "soul" or "spirit," as individuals we have been "gathered," in Teilhard words, "from all time and the four corners of space into a wondrous knot" so that each of us is an utterly unique expression of the cosmic process and called to contribute to it nothing less than the mystery of ourselves.

Those are scientific concepts, although the language obviously isn't. I see them as good examples of the convergence of contemporary science and the deepest core of humanity's religious insights.

When we recognize that those concepts are descriptions of our place in the scheme of things, they are, in themselves, sufficiently powerful to move us out of the dreary perspectives of religious dualism and scientific rationalism which have haunted the western world for many centuries.

They provide a strong sense of meaning and purpose because they allow us to see our personal existence as part of the evolution of the physical universe. They also help us to realize that, as persons, we are no more static than is the rest of the cosmos. In the language of the neuro-sciences, the conscious ego is an actively fluctuating process, internally self-regulated and self-organized.

As I spelled out in entry #14 (Person as Process), "neuro-gnosis" (our conscious awareness) is the "informational content" of the media of nerve cells and networks of neural structures in which the informational content is "coded" and by way of which it gets modified via our life experience. That awareness, the brain's structuring of the cognized environment, depends on a number of things, including our genes, our developmental history, our present level of structural development and our external environment.

In everyday language, all those words simply mean that we grow and develop just as do the stars, planets and the living things of the Earth, and that the context in which we're growing makes a difference. And because we are in state of continuous dynamic transformation, everything we perceive from the external world is conditioned by our state of structural organization and thus expressed in us as a transformation of that cognized world.

But we don't grow and develop as isolated individuals. Our development takes place within that specifically social and communal context which the human sciences call "culture." That's the main idea in posts #22 (The Other Half of Person) and #23 (Ontogenetic Development). This present post and the next are about Biogenetic Structuralism's understanding of the three phases of our ontogenetic development within the cultural context.

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My emphasis on culture is a change in focus from the previous thoughts I've been sharing about the convergence of science and religion. It's a shift from neurological information about how the brain works to information from cultural anthropology about how we develop as conscious persons within the social-cultural context. It's an important transition in the perspectives I've been offering. Previously, those perspectives centered on how the human mind-brain got to be that way ("evolution" in the broadest cosmic sense); now the focus is on to the results of that emergence of conscious awareness (that is, on "culture" in the broadest cosmic sense).

My main point here is that our personal consciousness, which we can think of as "immaterial" or "mental" or "spiritual," is not only in continuity with the earlier levels of biological complexity, but also includes the development of the biological, behavioral, cognitive and emotional aspects of conscious awareness in a communal context. It's all the one same process.

In thinking about ourselves from this anthropological rather than neurological viewpoint, it's important to keep in mind that "culture" refers to whatever we do that's not controlled by our genes and instincts.

As I spelled out in the previous post, culture includes anything and everything that gets "passed on," for the sake of life's survival, from more experienced to younger and less experienced persons. It includes not only language and technology but all the learning, skills and information which need to be passed on precisely because they are not part of our instinctive or genetically-based behavior. And it's in this creative educational-cultural context that our "ontogenetic" development takes place.

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A problem in understanding culture as the context for our personal development is that the perspectives of cultural anthropology are unfamiliar to most of us. Our educational institutions and the media simply haven't caught up yet with this branch of scientific research. Cultural anthropology is probably the least familiar of all the contemporary sciences.

But it has much to contribute to a contemporary understanding of ourselves: it's nothing less than the scientific observation of how humans act in groups and the efforts of research scientists to understand our social-communal behavior. It's also the context in which the convergence of scientific and religious perspectives becomes especially clear.

As I've said, we're just not yet attuned to thinking in terms of culture, but it's what we need to do if we are to understand our place in the scheme of things. We need to see not only that the entire cosmic process takes place at three levels of increasing complexity (matter, life and mind) and that the development of human culture is in continuity with that process, but also and specifically that it's culture that is the context for our personal conscious development.

I've referred to this "long view" frequently. I spelled it out in posts #8 (Background to Biogenetic Structuralism) and #16 (Our Own Inner World), and I offered a quick review of it in the previous post (#23 Ontogenetic Development).

I'm emphasizing its importance because, while it's relatively easy to think of our individual selves as part of the cosmic process, it's not so easy to think in terms of our communal relationships within it. It's indeed challenging to see our ontogenetic development in terms of the one cosmic process which continues-- from the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago and the evolution of galaxies, stars and planets to the emergence of life on Earth, the development of the primate brain and the emergence of conscious awareness several million years ago-- to our group behavior at this very moment.

But that's the context in which our personal ontogenetic development takes place.

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Thanks to its origin in the field of cultural anthropology, Biogenetic Structuralism sees that the three phases of our ontogenetic-cultural development all have to do with the same ultimate question: "What is our place in scheme of things?"

In cultural anthropology, this understanding of "our place in the scheme of things" is called a culture's cosmology. It's described as a culturally-conditioned, cognized view of reality, where reality is seen as an organized whole which offers an account of all the significant elements and relationships that go to make up the universe. What those technical words come down to is that a culture's cosmology defines the place of the individual and the group within the universe.

The "group" can be small as a nuclear family or as large as all humanity of together, and it's in this largest, what might be called "planetary" sense, that the phrase "New Cosmology" is used in both contemporary scientific and religious thought. The New Cosmology is the essentially dynamic rather than static understanding we have today, thanks to modern science, of the place of the individual and the group within the universe. It includes cosmic, biological and human evolution.

Because science is cross-cultural, the New Cosmology is the birthright of all humanity. This is a new situation in our understanding of the world and for this reason the New Cosmology is often referred to as the "New Story" or the "New Story of the Universe." Of course it really is the new story of ourselves. And as Thomas Berry observed many years ago, it's a story we can all agree with.

In New Cosmologist Brian Swimme's words, "For the first time in human existence we have a cosmic story that is not tied to one cultural tradition.... but instead gathers every human group into its meanings."

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With regard to our ontogenetic development, cultural anthropologists have observed that most world cultures (although not that of the modern West) recognize that we humans have an internal drive to experience reality at all three levels or phases, and that (at least in all pre-industrial cultures) there is an impetus to guide members through those three stages of ontogenetic development. In the Biogenetic Structuralist framework, both the personal internal drive and the social impetus to guide members are understood themselves to be aspects of the cosmic evolutionary process.

The issue of guidance is a big topic, too big to talk about here; so to keep this posting from becoming too long, I will describe my understanding of the first two phases in this entry and save the third phase, where the issue of guidance makes most sense, for the next post.

Easy tags for the three stages (or levels or phases) of the development of consciousness are belief, experience and participation.

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"Belief" sounds like a religious term, but in the anthropological perspective it simply means whatever we accept on the word of others about our place in the scheme of things. It is vicarious knowledge rather than knowledge based on personal experience. Biogenetic Structuralism calls it "received gnosis" to emphasize that while it is our own conscious understanding, it has been given to us by others.

"Belief" doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what we usually think of as religion, although religious beliefs obviously would be included in this first phase of conscious development since they are the gnosis we have about the way things are because we have been told that that's the way things are.

The scientific study of the processes by which we are told that "this is the way things are" is a principal focus of cultural anthropology. The process is called "enculturation" and while it definitely includes catechism-like instruction, it also includes things like the stories, legends, dramas and rituals which are a normal part of every culture.

A good example of a means of enculturation in a non-western culture would be the puppet plays presented in a temple I visited when I was in Singapore. In our culture, Christmas pageants would have a similar role.

But this first phase of ontogenetic development includes all the beliefs a culture offers. In our contemporary situation that means, for example, all the taken-for-granted views about reality presented in TV shows and newspaper ads and on the Web. But it includes whatever we accept to be so, without personal experience of it: whatever we think is true because somebody else has said, or in some other way indicated, that it is.

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Despite all that, it's important to be aware that "belief" is not necessarily a bad thing. We couldn't survive the earliest years of childhood without it. And we continue to need and make use of "received gnosis" throughout our lives.

But because it has come to have a bad name, especially as the result of its exploitation by the advertising media and by political and religious authorities, I feel the need to stress that it's not necessarily something negative.

For example, many of the findings of science constitute beliefs for all of us. A trivial example is the existence of Halley's Comet. Most of us have heard of it and we may know that it returns to the Earth approximately every seventy-five years, but few of us have ever seen it. The existence of Halley's Comet is a belief rather than a personal experience for most of us. So is the existence of DNA or chlorophyll. We are dependent on phase one belief for much of our knowledge of the physical world.

Of course, religious beliefs also are examples of this "received gnosis." My point is that whenever we take someone else's word for something we are operating at this first stage of the ontogenetic development of our consciousness.

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According to the noted University of Pennsylvania neuro-scientist Andrew Newberg, this first stage of ontogenetic development is wired into the human brain. We can't do without it.

In previous posts I've mentioned that it was media reports of Newberg's work involving brain scans of meditating Buddhist monks and Catholic nuns which originally lead me to the discovery of the earlier generation of researchers (the Biogenetic Structuralists) with which his work is in continuity. Much of Newberg's research focuses on an understanding of the first phase of ontogenetic development in a religious context.

His most recent book is Born to Believe: God, Science, and the Origin of Ordinary and Extraordinary Beliefs (2007). It's the paperback edition, with a preface and for some reason a different title, of his 2006 book, Why We Believe What We Believe: Uncovering Our Biological Need for Meaning, Spirituality, and Truth. Obviously "belief" is a central interest for Newberg.

His earlier books have similar titles: Why God Won't Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief (2002) and The Mystical Mind: Probing the Biology of Religious Experience (1999).

None of these books is light reading. They are challenging both in terms of their content and of their often less-than-easy-to-understand style. Essentially, they are attempts to respond to the question of what's going on in the brain during the various phases of ontogenetic development.

I've mentioned Newberg's books to emphasize the importance of belief not just in our everyday lives but especially to emphasize its importance for an understanding of the convergence of science and religion.

Because of the exploitation and abuse of this "received gnosis" by church, government and business leaders, we can easily have a negative attitude toward "belief" and overlook the fact that it is a significant phase of our ontogenetic development. As a foremost pioneering research scientist, Newberg helps us to see that belief is something we should not overlook. We need a clear understanding of it from both an anthropological and a neurological point of view.

The anthropological perspective is easier to understand than the neurological. I've offered the beginnings of an anthropological understanding of belief in this post. And sometime I'd like to offer simple and clear descriptions of the neurological understanding of things like what's going on in the brain when we accept something to be true on the word of others. I'm not ready to do that yet, but I hope I'll be able to, eventually.

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Meanwhile, I need to say something about the second phase of ontogenesis. Luckily, this one doesn't need a lot of explanation. We know from personal experience what we mean by "personal experience."

This second phase of ontogenetic development is no less fascinating in terms of what's happening in the brain during it, and nowadays frequent reports of studies along these lines appear in the media. It's impossible to keep up with it.

The main thing I want to point out here is that, in terms of the convergence of scientific findings and religious perspectives, the acquired perspectives and attitudes of phase one may, or may not, be confirmed via our personal experience in phase two. Personal experience may verify the information we previously accepted to be true on the word of others; but it also may contradict that received gnosis. The result is, of course, that we often find ourselves at odds with our upbringing and with commonly accepted social views and attitudes.

Obviously, dysfunctional families as well as dysfunctional religious institutions and dysfunctional administrative governments do a great deal of damage. Much healing is required in our society. People talk nowadays more freely than in the past, for example, about their struggles to recover from an alcoholic parent or to get rid of their "religious baggage." And we can hardly go anywhere nowadays without hearing talk about our need to recover from the phase one acceptance of military and environmental information given out by American political leaders.

My point is that because the healing process is so urgently needed for so many in our society and for society as a whole, we can forget that there's a third stage of personal development.

And it's precisely that third stage to which we have to turn if we are to see the real convergence of the contemporary scientific worldview and the deeper values of humanity's religious traditions. The third stage is where healing is found.

It is precisely the wholistic worldview of the New Cosmology which provides us with the wholeness-making process that's so urgently needed in our damaged culture.

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Biogenetic Structuralism understands the third level of consciousness beyond personal experience as nothing less than our personal participation in the cosmic process. It's this scientific understanding of the third phase which involves those things which in the two previous posts I called "in-between" ideas.

I called symbol, myth and ritual "in-between" ideas because they're not only perennial aspects of humanity's global religious practice but also objects of study in the sciences of cultural anthropology and neuro-physiology. They bridge the gap, as odd as it may sound, between science and religion.

But they are also "in-between" concepts in a second sense. Much like what the noted Canadian professor Charles Taylor called our "yearning for eternity" (in his recent Commonweal article which I quoted in the previous post), symbol, myth and ritual tend to be dismissed as belonging to an earlier and more immature stage of human development.

Note that, however, that dismissal itself is a belief. Along with individualism, it's a major belief of the western culture's materialist-rationalist cosmology.

But in terms of what I've called in post #22 "the other half of person" (i.e., the communal and relational parts of our human nature), these "in-between" concepts are essential aspects of our self-understanding. In the scientific perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism, myths and symbolic rituals are understood to be nothing less than the tools by which we participate in the cosmic process.

As I've mentioned many times in these blog entries, I've been interested in both ritual and evolution all my life. So you can get some idea, I hope, of the delight I experienced when I first discovered, thanks to the work of Andrew Newberg, the scientific perspectives of Biogenetic Structuralism which embraces both and attempts to integrate them into its over-all understanding of our human place in the scheme of things.

I don't have the skill to convey those feelings well, but from my forty years as a teacher I've got some ability to spell out the concepts involved. Which is why, of course, I started this blog for "sharing thoughts about the convergence of science and religion." I've had to do a lot of clearing and plowing the ground before I could share these thoughts about ritual and symbol with readers, so I'm glad to finally get the point where I can do that.

sam@macspeno.com