#26. Help From Uncle Louie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Big ideas, indeed!

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

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

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

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

sam@macspeno.com

#25. Ontogenesis: Phase Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's where symbol comes in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

sam@macspeno.com

#22. The Other Half of "Person"

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

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

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

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

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

There's another half to person.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So... Thanks, thanks, thanks!

sam@macspeno.com

#21. Struggling with Words

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It isn't easy to write about the convergence of science and religion.

Each time I use the word "science" I feel the need to make the point that I'm not talking about 19th century rationalist-positivist science. 

That early form of science rejected feeling and emotion and even personal consciousness itself as a component of the real world. It was a materialist and mechanical understanding of living things and human life and it is, unfortunately, what "science" still means for many people today.

And each time I use the word "religion" I have a similar need to make the point that I'm not talking about fundamentalist and authoritarian religion. Religious dualism, like rationalist science, was unable to see humanity as a part of the physical world and emphasized our need to escape from it. It, too, is still with us today.

Although post-rationalist science has been around since the late 1800s, we don't yet have a good name for it. It includes relativity, quantum mechanics and complexity theory, but its most distinctive characteristic is its understanding of the world as dynamic rather than static, and it recognizes personal consciousness as an integral part of the cosmic process.

Our understanding of religion has likewise changed dramatically since the end of the 19th century. In the 20th century, there were major changes in religious thought just as there were in scientific thought. 

Theologians have not only recovered the inner core of the Judeo-Christian tradition which had been lost to western civilization after the Dark Ages but also have moved forward to include the best values of the modern world; those values especially include an appreciation of the universe as developmental and of persons as central to the cosmic process.

We don't yet have a good name for non-dualist religion, just as we don't have a good name yet for post-mechanistic science; but as a way of wisdom rather than theological concepts, it can be called sapiential or sophianic.

Contemporary science and contemporary religious thought converge precisely in their understanding of the cosmos as evolutionary and of human consciousness as integral to it.

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I was delighted when I discovered Biogenetic Structuralism because its emphasis-- on understanding in an evolutionary context the brain and nervous system and the religious behavior which results from it-- helps bring these things together. It attempts to integrate the various perspectives of the physical, biological and human sciences, and sees human consciousness at the center of it all.

It's those perspectives which are what I've been attempting to share with readers via this blog.

In posting #8 I offered a background to the whole Biogenetic Structuralist view and in post #10 an overview of the basic ideas found in these creative scientists' initial 1974 book, Biogenetic Structuralism. 

In those two postings I spelled out some specific points which I find especially significant in terms of the convergence of science and religion.

Most of the postings since have offered details about what I see as the main idea of this convergence: the centrality of personal consciousness and our participatory role in the cosmic process.

We're still not use to thinking of ourselves this way, so these ideas are worth bringing together here.

In post #12, The Cognitive Extension of Prehension, I described the neurological understanding of personal consciousness as being both something new to the cosmic evolutionary process and at the same time rooted in the life of the Earth.

This understanding alone marks the end of religious dualism, as I tried to spell out in post #11: it takes away nothing of the spiritual nature of the human person to know ourselves as the result of the evolution of the universe. Indeed, it greatly enhances our understanding of human dignity.

In post #13, Cognized Environment, I described some of the basic neurological findings about the workings of the human brain with regard to the fact that human consciousness is the universe become conscious of itself. I've mentioned these central ideas in many entries since.

Post #14 deals with the mystery of ourselves as a process rather than as something static. While thinking of the universe as a process is one thing, thinking of ourselves that way is much more challenging. But it opens us to a far larger self-understanding than is possible in the old static worldview.

It helps us to see, for example, the utter uniqueness of each person, as I described in post #16.

And, when we recognize that what the universe is doing is making unique personal copies of itself (post #17) and that we are called to freely contribute our personal uniqueness to the evolutionary process (post #18), we have a much more integral and wholistic of ourselves and the world than our ancestors ever could.

Post #19 has to do with how we respond to our call to take part in the creative process; each of us is called to become a personal embodiment of that diversity which appears to be a central goal of the universe. I called that participation "our service to God." And in the most recent posting, #20, I described what might be called God's service to us, resurrection of the dead.

In each case, I've tried to point out areas where contemporary science is saying something much like the insights which have emerged in the new religious thinking. Central to both is precisely the evolutionary or development perspective missing from rationalist science and dualistic religion.

The ideas in each separate blog entry are a challenge. But while the words and concepts may be unfamiliar, when taken together they begin to form a coherent picture of that very different view of things which has emerged from contemporary science and which relates to the contemporary recovery of the "sapiential" foundations of western religion.

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In trying to spell out all this, one of the major problems I encounter is a lack of clear and useful terms. We don't yet have the right words to allow us to express well these post-19th century viewpoints.

Religious people still hear "science" as a synonym for atheistic materialism, and non-religious people still hear "religion" as synonymous with superstition and ignorance. In the pre-20th century context of rationalism and dualism, religion and science are mutually exclusive worldviews. They can only be imaged together in terms of conflict and the very idea of their convergence seems to be an impossibility.

Examples of that static 19th century perspective-- often presented in terms of "faith versus reason" and "belief versus atheism"-- are still found daily in the media. It's only when we see things from a dynamic-developmental perspective that we can see points of convergence.

I offered a challenging example in the most recent post (#20) where I described how the Biogenetic Structuralist description of the relationship between inner consciousness and the external world sounds similar to the understanding of the relationship between the human spirit and the material cosmos found in the discussion by the Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov of the ancient Judeo-Christian doctrine of resurrection of the dead.

The fact that so many thoughtful people have a difficult time with the idea that completion and fulfillment might be a normal part of the cosmic process demonstrates how totally pervasive the static rationalist-positivist perspective continues to be.

In a dynamic unitive perspective, where diversity and uniqueness can be seen as central values to the cosmic process, it doesn't seem so inconsistent to assume that our personal contribution to the cosmic process will be incorporated into it.

We know so little, still, about the laws of the natural world. It may be that those laws include, rather than exclude, a completion of the cosmos process in such a way that nothing-- and especially not its central value of personal consciousness-- will be lost.

My point here is not to argue for the truth of a specific religious doctrine, but only to say that once we move out of the 19th century static worldview, some significant convergences become apparent. If, that is, we can find the right words to express them without evoking the 19th century meanings still attached to them.

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Here's a second important example of the struggle for helpful words. It's our need to express clearly the common understanding, found in both the sapiential religious perspective and the contemporary scientific worldview but totally lacking in the dualistic-mechanistic perspective, of the inter-relatedness of things.

I've found the Biogenetic Structuralist view especially useful here. Just as it helps us to spell out the nature of the individual person in an evolutionary perspective, so it also helps us to understand the communal aspects of the mystery of personal consciousness.

Biogenetic Structuralism calls itself "Anthropology Plus" because, while it began with the efforts of 20th-century cultural anthropologists, it also includes a strong emphasis on the evolutionary development of the primate brain and the consequent social-cultural aspects of human existence seen in that context. For these reasons, its understanding of personal consciousness is especially helpful in understanding ourselves in the broadest possible scientific perspectives of cosmic, biological and cultural evolution. And this, of course, is also the context in which 20th-century religious thinkers have been working out their new understandings of human nature.

But both efforts have a difficult time finding the right words to express the communal or relational aspects of human existence.

So, just as I feel the need, each time I use the word "science," to say that I mean more than its conventional 19th-century rationalist-positive sense, and each time I use the word "religion" to say that I mean more than its conventional dualist and authoritarian sense, so I feel a similar need each time I use the word "person." In the cosmic context of both contemporary science and religious thought, "person" refers to far more than individual. But "person," as the rugged individual of America's early pioneer days, still remains the ideal in conventional perspectives.

I know it sounds odd to say that "There's more to person than the individual." But that's exactly my point. Finding good words to talk about it is the struggle I'm pointing to in this blog entry. The communal and relational aspects of person are part of the perspectives of both contemporary science and contemporary religion, but in trying to express those converging perspectives well, the very words we do have available tend to get in the way as much as they are helpful.

Ours is such an individualistic culture that the very idea that there might be something beyond the ego-stage of personal development is as incomprehensible to many as is the idea, from a rationalistic point of view, that the universe's evolutionary process might have a positive outcome.

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In any case, in sharing my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion, it's some ideas about this understanding that "there's more to person than the individual" which is what I'm planning to present next.

What I hope to do is to take the ideas about person which I've presented in the earlier postings to the next step, where the emphasis is on our communion and connectedness with all things.

The words we have available to talk about the development of personal consciousness beyond the individualistic stage are both familiar and yet fuzzy for most of us. They include terms such as myth, ritual, symbol, shamanism and cosmology, and no matter what our background, most of us may be inclined to automatically dismiss one or more of them as irrelevant. But none of them are.

Religious ritual, for example, constitutes a fundamental part of humanity's religious practice, and while the idea that science might have something positive to say about it will seem to many an exaggeration, the place of ritual in personal and communal development is, in fact, a major part of the Biogenetic Structuralist perspective. The second of these pioneering researchers' three basic texts is The Spectrum of Ritual.

It is in that book that they describe the development of personal consciousness in the context of the cosmic process and the evolution of the brain as an experience of reality at three distinct levels of cosmological understanding. And it is thoughts about those levels of experience, and how the scientific understanding of them converges with the emerging sapiential perspectives, that I hope to share with readers in my next few blog postings.

Ambitious, to be sure! And sure to be a struggle to come up with the right words.

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But you can help.

We've all had teachers who obviously knew what they were talking about, but were unable to convey their ideas clearly. Less obvious is that what helps a speaker to communicate clearly with others is, more than anything else, the feedback the listeners provide.

Feedback takes innumerable forms, from an unconscious shuffling of feet or a repeated glancing at the clock to the slightest hint of a smile as well as an explicit comment or question.

So please, shuffle your feet-- electronically. Or e-mail a hint of a smile. I need your feedback.

If the formal blog-comment process seems too complicated, just use my regular e-mail. The address is below. Thanks!

sam@macspeno.com