#149. A Psychology for the New Cosmology

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

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

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#149. A Psychology for the New Cosmology

This post #149 contains some thoughts stimulated by a master's thesis, "Henry Corbin and Russian Religious Thought," submitted in August 2013 as part of Master’s of Arts program at the Institute of Islamic Studies, McGill University in Montreal, by Hadi Fakhoury. The full text is available on Tom Cheetham's website.

The main idea of Fakhoury's thesis is straightforward: that the noted Islamic scholar Henry Corbin (1903-1978) was considerably influenced by Russian religious thought.

In the first of its four chapters Fakhoury gives an excellent introduction to Russian religious thought over the last two centuries. He shows how Corbin made use of the work of Sergius Bulgakov (1871-1944) to spell out his own understanding of the Islamic expressions of Divine Wisdom and its guidance in human life.

I found the fourth chapter, where Fakhoury spells out Corbin's use of the work of Alexsi Khomiakov (1804-1860) to explain the Iranian spiritual world, most fascinating.

The main idea is that that there is in fact an Iranian "spiritual universe" which came into existence long before the beginning of Islam and which persists even to this day in Islamic Sufism.

Its roots go back to the ancient Persian religious leader Zoroaster (628-551 BCE), and was brought to new life through the efforts of the work of the 12th century Sufi leader, Suhrawardi (1155-1191 CE).

In spelling out Suhrawardi’s “Iranism,” Corbin also draws on the concept of “Byzantinism” coined by the conservative Russian religious thinker Konstantin Leontiev (1831-1891).

It is a somewhat bewildering mix-- of ancient Persian, Medieval Islamic, and Russian religious thought-- but Corbin would like to see it incorporated into the contemporary understanding of global religious perspectives. I think Corbin is right.

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Personally, I find several things of major significance in Fakhoury's presentation of Corbin's ideas. The most important, I think, has to do with my life-long interest in the nature of religious ritual.

Another, closely related, is the nature of the long-neglected fourth function of human awareness for which we still lack a commonly-understood name. Jung calls it "Intuition," others call "Imagery" and "Super-sensory perception." Corbin's name for it is "Creative Imagination."

A third item of major significance is a very clear understanding of the nature of modern matter-mind rationalism and of body-spirit dualism which emerges from Corbin's presentation of what I think of as his mistaken need for an intermediate realm of reality which he calls the mundus imaginalis.

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Some words about Corbin's understanding of Suhrawardi’s lifework will be helpful. In a 1966 essay titled “From the Heroic Epic to the Mystical Epic," Corbin describes Suhrawardi’s interpretation of the ancient Iranian-Persian heroic epics. He saw Suhrawardi’s project as a “resuscitation” of the theosophy ("religious wisdom") professed by the Sages of ancient Persia.

Suhrawardi saw those ancient sages as predecessors in the Islam of his time of those called Ishraqiyun, "Disciples of Light."

Corbin makes the point that, while Suhrawardi's work of proclaiming his kinship with the sages of ancient Iran reveals that Suhrawardi did envision an “Iranism,” he was not describing objective history but a “meta-historical” fact, something psychological. Corbin describes it as an “event that took place in Suhrawardi’s soul."

As I see it, Corbin's emphasizes the non-historically-factual nature of Suhrawardi's perspectives because Corbin wants to say that they are, or belong to, another realm of reality, that 'in-between' realm which he calls the mundus imaginalis.

In the course of Fakhoury's presentation, an amazing number of names are used to describe the soul-event being talked about here: besides "meta-historical" and "imaginal," some are more psychological-- such as "personal," "experiential" and "existential"-- while other are more conventionally religious-- such as "spiritual," "priestly" and "holy."

Of great interest to me is Corbin's own term for Suhrawardi's psychological-religious soul-event: “creative intuition.” The emphasis is not just on the fact that it's a perception of reality, but that it is a new-- previously non-existing-- perception.

Corbin is describing an essential aspect of that long-neglected fourth function of consciousness: creativity. "Creative intuition" doesn't mean seeing something new, but seeing something in a new way. My wording for it is "seeing newly." It's like the phrase used by liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983) to describe the nature of the new creation: "not new things, but things made new."

Corbin says this soul-event is its own "source and principle of explanation." I want to emphasize that it is a new perception, a new conscious awareness, and that the change is epistemological, not-- as Corbin's words would seem to imply-- ontological.

Corbin also uses a phrase I like a lot in describing the results of this creative soul-event; by it, he says "a new past emerges."

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Fakhoury points out that the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948) uses a similar term: "creative newness." Both Berdyaev and Corbin are talking about the same thing, a perception by personal consciousness that didn't exist before.

In explaining why a creative perception doesn't have a past, Berdyaev says it is achieved "in existential time." I'd emphasize that his use of the term "existential" is his way of saying that a human person, a consciously aware being, did the perceiving. (With philosophers, such things aren't necessarily obvious!)

Berdyaev also notes that “creative newness” cannot be explained in terms of the past, because, being achieved in existential time, it knows "no system of causal links.” Although I have more to say about this below, I want to note here that from this we can see that neither Corbin nor Berdyaev value cosmic space and time as they might; they are both operating in a pre-evolutionary worldview. This point helps make sense of the strong dualistic language used by both of them.

Fakhoury includes a reference to Berdyaev's 1941 book The Beginning and the End, where Berdyaev makes the point that there is "no new 'object" in a creative intuition, that it only makes sense "when we start from the subject." Once again, Berdyaev is simply saying that creative newness comes only by way of personal consciousness-- indeed, a very important point.

In describing creative newness Berdyaev uses language which demonstrates a very negative view of the world: “It is in fallen time," he says, "that the life of nature and historical life flow on. But everything that happens in time which has broken up into past, present and future, that is to say in time which is sick, is but a projection on to the external of what is being accomplished in depth."

I find it sad that these thinkers have to negate and devalue the real world in order to make their point about creativity and newness. From my perspective, they lacked the age-old and four-fold, "mandalic" understanding of personal self-awareness.

Berdyaev also uses the language of "vertical vs horizontal" in talking about "true creative newness." He says it's not only achieved "in existential time" but also vertically, not horizontally.

Again, it seems a pity that he has to negate one dimension of reality to make another dimension more important. There's no reason to exclude relationships just to say other realities are valid, too. (Bruno is the one religious thinker I know who emphasizes that for a complete picture the four-fold view is needed. And once again, Hooray for Bruno!)

As a summing up of this point I want to note that there is simply no need to mistake epistemology for ontology. I am sympathetic with their efforts, but the world-negating wording they come out with-- left over from a static-dualistic worldview-- is neither helpful nor valid for today. Our great need is not to negate the world but to understand our place in it.

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Corbin uses the phase "a new past emerges" when he is discussing what are called the "recitals" of Suhrawardi. The "recitals" are a ritual re-telling and re-living of the stories of the old Iranian myth-heroes.

That the past becomes present in acts of creative intuition is an understanding long-familiar to me from my interest in ritual. It has been especially well described in the works of early- and mid- 20th century liturgical scholars. (And here I offer special thanks for the work of Alexander Schememann mentioned above).

What Corbin calls "reversal of time"-- his wording for saying that the past becomes present for those participating in the 'recital'-- validates for me the correctness of my understanding of ritual.

Corbin also says that in the creative act the past is "absolved" (and I thought maybe a better word would be "dissolves"), but either word would seem to miss the main point: that while what was, remains in the past, it also becomes real in the present. I think this is the essence of what's being described here, whether we call it "recital" or "liturgy" or "ritual"-- or even "dance" as some Native Peoples do.

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A major question is how this "seeing, newly" happens. And that question is much more readily answer-able in the modern evolutionary worldview than in the static, dualistic and patriarchal perspectives of the past.

In the energy-focused dynamic cosmic context we can more easily understand that what makes the newness available-- both then and now-- is the tune-ing in, by personal consciousness, to the energy processes of the universe.

And that, as I understand it, is the very essence of religious experience via ritual. As I see it, this is one of the places where a more complete understanding of science-- as the understanding of time and space, matter and energy-- allows us to move far beyond the antagonisms of religious fundamentalism and scientific rationalism.

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Corbin was opposed to both religious fundamentalism and scientific rationalism, and yet he seemed to remain stuck in the worldview of static dualism.

For example, in talking about how a new past emerges Corbin uses the Arabic word hikayat, which means a narration that is at the same time an imitation or a repetition. The word applies to the kind of ritual which is a re-telling and/or an acting out of 'the old (or "basic", "foundational") stories and myths. Corbin says that in the hikayat, the Reciter is the actual and active actor. And this makes good sense.

But then, speaking from his anti-reality attitude, Corbin also says that "we ravish this past, and ourselves with it, from the causality known as historical causality." I think this is an especially important source for an understanding of Corbin's Docetism and his strong anti-Incarnation views.

It's also helpful for understanding the reasons for his "anti-historical" perspective, manifest when he notes that the creative act is a “history that breaks history.” He calls it an eschatological history-- which "in reverting the deeds of the heroes of ancient Iran to their “true,” “inner” meaning, simultaneously leads the mystical pilgrim “to his real being, to his origin, to his ‘Orient’.”

I hear all this as talk about human purpose and meaning, about eschaton and what I like to call "our fullest significance." Unfortunately, Corbin, like Berdyaev, again seems to need to negate one view to affirm the other. (More on that, shortly.)

In any case, we can learn a great deal of wonderfully valuable stuff from these various religious thinkers-- Medieval and modern, Islamic and Russian-- despite their inability to express themselves in a more contemporary non-dualistic, not-static and non-patriarchal socio-cultural context.

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I see this inability as a major problem, so it seems important to spell it out a bit more here. Suhrawardi's idea of "Iranism" is a good place for that effort.

In spelling out Suhrawardi’s “Iranism,” Corbin also draws on the concept of “Byzantinism” coined by the conservative Russian religious thinker Konstantin Leontiev (1831-1891).

Corbin relates Suhrawardi’s “Iranism” to the "Byzantinism" of the conservative Russian religious thinker mentioned earlier, Konstantin Leontiev. It is a bit complicated, but well-worth staying with, for the sake of the resulting clarity.

Corbin sees Suhrawardi’s “Iranism” and Leontiev’s “Byzantinism” as both being in contrast to their opposite, which Leontiev called "Kush-ism." Corbin says all this as a version of "Hegel’s system."

According to Corbin, the whole philosophy of Hegel (1770-1831) "rests upon the contrast between two types and upon the conflict of two principles in history": freedom and necessity.

These opposites, also referred to as spirituality and materialism, result in Leontiev's "Iranism-Byzantinism vs "Kushism," which is then extended to include "Russia vs Europe" and "East vs the West."

According to Berdyaev, the "principle of necessity" has to do with materialism and logic, while the "principle of freedom" has to do with creativity and morality.

From a mandalic perspective, we can easily see that materialism and logical reasoning come from the Sensing and Thinking functions of consciousness (our awareness of matter and sequential time), while morality and creativity come from the Feeling and Intuition functions (our awareness of spatial relatedness and the dynamic energy of the cosmos).

The dualistic implication is that the fixed necessities, matter and time, are bad, while space and energy, the more free aspects of reality, are good. In a patriarchal context, this also makes the bad-and-necessity aspects 'masculine' while the good-and-free aspects are 'feminine.'

Note, too, that it is the "good" group which is called by the dozen or so different names I mentioned earlier: "meta-historical," "imaginal," "creative," "religious," "priestly," "holy," "spiritual," "personal," "psychological," "experiential," "existential."

The whole point here-- of Khomiakov, Hegel, Berdyaev and Corbin-- is that what's of highest value is freedom and spirituality, in contrast to necessity and materialism. And this, of course, is a most blatant dualism.

They also found "necessity"-- that is, the power of materiality over the spirit-- in pagan religions, in Roman Catholicism and in Western rationalism. It's "us vs them" on a very large scale!

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(This present paragraph should probably be a footnote, but I want to add it for completeness.) Fakhoury makes clear the emphasis, essentially and primarily by Khomiakov, on the presumed superiority of Iran-ism over Kush-ism. Iranism "is founded on tradition and cannot be restored by a purely logical action, because the concept of creative freedom cannot be chained to and deduced from formulae."

This is being said in support of Corbin's ideas about Suhrawardi making the past present (i.e., that "a new past emerges"), and that Iranism "can only be discerned by a superior intuition [i.e., some kind of higher activity], going beyond the narrow limits of reasoning." Khomiakov also associates the notion of "creative freedom" with “tradition.”

Fakhoury's point is that this view anticipates Corbin’s own association of the notion of “renaissance” with “tradition”: what Corbin has to say about Suhrawardi's 'recovery' of the pre-Islamic Iranian views is coming from-- and, at least in some sense, based on-- Khomiakov.

This is important because Corbin draws a parallel between Khomiakov’s notion of “Iranism,” which denotes “creative freedom” rooted in tradition, and the “free creative inspiration” which Corbin saw enabled Suhrawardi to claim he was the “resurrector” of the theosophical wisdom of ancient Persia.

Corbin ends all this with a kind of hymn to what I think might be described as the "superior superiority" of Iran-ism over Kushitism. In "Irani-ism" Corbin includes Suhrawardi and those he calls "the Platonists of Persia," and in "Kushitism" he includes "Peripatetic philosophy, the dominion of Logic, and the necessity of the laws of rational understanding."

He adds that logical and physical necessity "is shattered by the visionary theosophy of the Khosrawaniyun from Iran, by the free flight of the configuring vision, the 'superior intuition' penetrating into the spiritual universes forbidden to the dialectic of Logic."

So all these Russian themes-- of freedom vs necessity, intuitivism vs rationalism, East vs West, Orthodoxy vs Catholicism-- ultimately come together for "the affirmation of the mundus imaginalis." And in which, Corbin adds, is "therefore the paradox, which in daring to 'exit' the constraints of empiricism and rational Logic, surmounts their antagonism."

My response: I don't think so!

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One more point. Fakhoury observes that Corbin also notes that there is a divergence between Khomiakov's and Suhrawardi's versions of “Iranism.”

Corbin notes that the Russian version is “the desire to elevate the hidden type at the root of the life of a people to a universal value.” He names this value “pravo-slava” (literally "right praise," a self-description of Russian Orthodoxy).

Corbin criticizes this “populism” as being too concerned with the consolidation of a “temporal ideal.” The pravo-slava ideal is too 'materialistic."

It's not sufficiently 'spiritualistic,' so Corbin uses the term "Oriental" describe what he saw as the purely spiritual “Iranism” of Suhrawardi. He notes that "the knowledge of the ancient Sages was not 'Oriental' simply because they happened to live in the geographical East. Rather, inversely, it is 'Oriental' knowledge that made these Iranians 'Orientals' par excellence."

Corbin calls this “Oriental" knowledge "the Light of Glory," and gives the Zoroastrian name for it "Xvarnah." He describes as "a hieratic ascendant in the Neoplatonic sense of the word."

His point is that “Orient” does not designate a geographical East, but rather symbolizes a spiritual light and knowledge which contrasts with knowing in a physical and material sense.

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To illustrate the point that "Orient" doesn't mean a geographical east but a spiritual knowing, Corbin draws a parallel between Suhrawardi and Konstantin Leontiev.

Fakhoury notes that Leontiev was at one time an admirer of Solovyov and an aesthete ["a person who has or affects to have a special appreciation of art and beauty"] but died as an Orthodox monk.

Leontiev's religious and political conservatism placed him at odds with the other religious thinkers of his generation. He rejected Solovyov’s “humanism,” charged Dostoevsky of promoting a “rosy Christianity,” and considered Khomiakov’s Orthodoxy as “too liberal and modernised.” In contrast, he affirmed Byzantine Orthodoxy and the ascetic monasticism of Mount Athos.

Fakhoury says Leontiev “placed his faith neither in Russia nor in its people, but in the sacral and hieratic ideal of the Byzantine world.”

Corbin favors Leontiev here because, as he says, the Ishraqi Light-wisdom ideas in Iranian-Sufi Islam come from ancient Persia via Suhrawardi, there is "an essential affinity between the Byzantine and Iranian spiritual universes."

Fakhoury makes the point that Corbin's saying that Byzantium and Iran are alike is meant not in a 'historical' but in an 'ecumenical' sense.

Fakhoury also notes that the perceived “sacral” and “hieratic” sympathy between Byzantium and Iran "defies every historical analysis." Corbin gives an example from an exhibit of Byzantine mosaics in Isfahan: at least in the minds of the Islamic observers, Byzantine mosaics shine with a light of their own just as do the famous ceramic tile artworks of Isfahan.

Corbin also claims that for both Leontiev and Suhrawardi, it is not the people that is in itself essential, but the sacral idea which inhabits it and prevails in it. He's saying that what's really important is not the place or the people but the "concept." I find the language here-- saying that people are too material and too physical-- to be the grossest kind of dualism.

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But if we can move beyond the dualistic wording, there is something of the greatest value in all this. It sounds like Corbin is talking a dualism language of light vs darkness, but he is not.

The Zoroastrian Xvarnah is not about darkness vs light or evil vs good. Rather, the Light of Glory is about the goodness of the world which is already actual, and the goodness of the world which is yet to be realized. It's such a different perspective that it's difficult for us to even hear correctly what's being said.

It is an eschatological view, in the sense that it sees a purpose to reality. With it's distinction between what is and what is yet to be, this 25-century-old dynamic-emergence perspective is eminently suited to the modern evolutionary worldview!

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So despite all the dualistic language-- matter vs spirit, physical vs spiritual, a people vs an idea of them-- some very positive views comes from all this.

For one thing, my perception of the great need for a mandalic rather than patriarchal-dualistic understanding of human consciousness is greatly reinforced.

For another, Fakhoury's note that Corbin’s explanation of Suhrawardi’s claim to have revived the illuminative philosophy of ancient Iran, helps to clarify the nature of Corbin's own project. He is trying to do something very similar for our day.

As I mentioned earlier, Corbin says that in defining his spiritual lineage, Suhrawardi is not writing an objective history of philosophy or mysticism but a "history of souls." But I think it's not so much a "history" of souls that's being offered by Corbin's understanding of Suhrawardi as much as a psychology which is both non-static and non-dualistic.

In describing what's happening to people's consciousness, Suhrawardi is offering stories of soul-experiences, stories about the changes in humans' deepest awareness. And these inner transfiguration-events do not require us to remove ourselves from the world of time and space, matter and energy.

In many ways, I find it difficult to understand why this is such a big deal for many. Except that I realize, of course, that there are many-- academics and all who are greatly influenced by both rationalism and fundamentalism-- who still don't think too much in terms of mind or soul or psyche or conscious awareness. They think even less in terms of transformation, and not at all in terms of the dynamic means by which such transfiguration occurs.

They are still stuck in a static patriarchal psychology.

So what a delight it is for me to realize that this whole issue, of Corbin's use of Russian thinkers to make sense of Suhrawardi's recovery of the ancient Persian perspectives, ultimately comes down to what seems to me to be a especially successful attempt to describe both the methods and the efficacious effects of ritual.

We have the beginnings, at least, of a non-static psychology suitable for the New Cosmology!

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#48. Do We Have a Future?

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When I started this blog to share my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion, one of the first things I published was a report to my fellow high school graduates on the 50th anniversary of our graduation. It's in post #3.

The reunion planning committee had asked everyone, attending or not, to send notes about what they've been up to in recent years, to be published in an anniversary booklet and given to all who attended the reunion or sent in a report.

What I had been "up to" was an increasing awareness of the convergence of science and religion, specifically with regard to the question, “What is our place in the vast scheme of things?” I'd been thinking about that question for sixty years, and since my retirement in 2000 I’d given a good bit of time and energy to thinking through my understanding of it and how it might be expressed clearly for anyone else who might be interested.

I still continue to find fascinating what many of the front-running scientific thinkers, psychologists and religious writers have to say about "where we fit in." Although each uses very different words, they all seem to be saying something similar: that we humans are an integral part of the evolving universe and that we thrive in a dynamic relationship with the cosmic mystery.

I expressed it this way in post #3: "The Mystery behind the universe gives itself to us as the world and ourselves, guides and directs us, gathers us as individuals for all time and from the four corners of space into a wondrous Celtic knot and into a global community of diverse peoples, and promises our completion and fulfillment and the persistence of our relationships in the in-gathering of all beyond the passing away of things."

It's that last part of the statement that I want to explore in this post.

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Probably no aspect of western religion is more subject to ridicule than the idea that we have a future "beyond the passing away of things."

Because of the body-soul dualism inherited from Greek philosophy, western religion's idea of an after-life became such a mockery that people simply stopped thinking or talking about it. Many took an agnostic position, saying "I just don't know, and there doesn't seem to be any way any of us could know." But that's not very interesting. If you enjoy thinking about science and religion, agnosticism is simply no fun at all!

The dualistic view that comes from the static perspective of Greek philosophy is that persons have a permanent component that survives the decomposition of the body-- an immortal soul that persists after death because it was created to be immortal. In this view, escape from the world is the goal of human life.

Nineteenth-century scientific rationalism, with its reduction of the world to its material components, took the opposite view-- there is no soul, there is no immortality and only annihilation awaits us.

In a static worldview, either escape from the world into an after-life or our total annihilation seem to be the only possible responses.

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In dynamic worldview, things looks a bit different.

As Claude Tresmontant observes in his Study of Hebrew Thought (which I described in post #39), the "evolutionary metaphysics" of the Bible's wisdom tradition recognizes that "it is the nature of being to be continuously evolving." This dynamic view of the world is the basic understanding of the post-rationalist scientific view as well. Indeed, as I spelled out in post #38, the evolutionary worldview originally comes from the Hebrew experience of the Exodus.

In the evolutionary perspective, the question "Do we have a future?" becomes "Does the evolutionary process continue?"

The question isn't whether there is a direction to evolution. Direction seems clear enough; in the dynamic perspective, we easily see that the matter of the cosmos has evolved on Earth into biological life and eventually-- by way of mammalian and primate development-- into human beings, conscious persons.

We also see, although it's still a bit difficult in our individualistic society, that there is one more step in that sequence: beyond our individual development there is also our communal relationship with others. Science calls it "culture."

So, in the evolutionary perspective, the question is whether the dynamic sequence-- fourteen billion years of evolutionary development from stars to living things, persons and human communities-- is a dead-end in the long run.

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In its various forms, this is probably the most radical question we can ask. Is the universe meaningful? Or is it absurd? Do we have a future? Or is annihilation-- separately and together-- what's in store for us?

We know that once we did not exist and that we have come into existence out of apparent darkness and nothingness. Even dualistic religion and rationalist science agree on that.

But in the evolutionary perspectives of post-rationalist science, we can also see that we are part of that evolutionary process. We see that we have been gathered "from all time and the four corners of space" and that, out of the resulting complex chemical and biological components, our personal awareness and communal consciousness have emerged.

The question still remains, however, whether in the long run the process a dead-end. It's not a question science can answer. There's no empirical evidence.

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And yet almost every culture in the world has some understanding of our existence beyond death and of a reunion with those who have gone before us.

An in-gathering of some kind is imagined in almost every society: Abraham's Bosom, Happy Hunting Grounds, Heavenly Paradise Garden, a meeting with ancestors in the next world. Every culture envisions some kind of communal reality for humans after death.

C. G. Jung says that, in working with his older patients, he found that their unconscious psyche always acted as if it was to continue, even with persons who were expecting to die soon. He says that our deepest Self continues to presume and act as if it will persist. The psyche doesn't have any sense at all of an eventual annihilation.

Teilhard has an interesting comment about this. He says that if we didn't think we have a future we wouldn't even bother to answer the telephone. Today he'd probably say we wouldn't bother to check our e-mail!

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So, is there a way to make sense in our contemporary situation of the question "Do we have a future?"

I think the quaternary perspectives which I've spelled out in a number of previous posts can be of help.

I said in post #46 (Convergence?) that the best way I know to describe the distinction between science and religion is to say that science is about the anthropos-cosmos relationship, while religion is about the anthropos-theos relationship. And one way to state that difference is to use the imagery of the four directions on the Medicine Wheel which I spelled out in earlier posts: "Science is a primarily a Gold Eagle and White Buffalo expression of our conscious minds, while religion is primarily a Black Bear and Green Mouse activity."

In Jungian language we can say that science operates by way of the perception function called Sensation and the judgment function called Thinking, while religion, in contrast, operates by way of the perception function called Intuition and the judgment function called Feeling.

An easy way to summarize those concepts is to say that science looks at details and the sequential flow of things, while religion looks at the big picture and the inter-connections between everything.

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In four recent posts I used those quaternary perspectives to spell out the four-fold imagery of the anthropos-theos relationship contained in the Bible's wisdom literature. I called those posts Evening Wisdom (#42, Sophia as Architect), Morning Wisdom (#43, Sophia as Guide), Noonday Wisdom (#44, Sophia as Gatherer) and Midnight Wisdom (#45, Sophia as Provider).

I think the question of whether we have a future can be asked in terms of these wisdom perspectives, specifically in terms of the perspective I've called Midnight Wisdom.

As I spelled out in post #45, the sages among the Hebrew shepherds and farmers used agricultural imagery to describe this aspect of the anthropos-theos relationship. They pictured Sophia as vegetation (a tree, plant or vine) to describe Divine Wisdom as a source of food, shelter and protection, providing for the existence and life of the children of the Earth.

In that same post I mentioned that just as in the hunting culture of the Plains Indians the buffalo is understood to quite literally give itself for the life of the people, in these agricultural images Sophia is also understood to give herself so the people might live. She especially provides the food, shelter and protection needed in the dark of night and the cold of winter, the time and season specifically associated with North on the Medicine Wheel.

Like the North's White Buffalo, the mystery behind the universe provides us with what's needed for survival and the fullness of our lives. And as I said in post #45, "Contemporary scientists, cosmologists, theoretical physicists, psychotherapists; Orthodox and Catholic theologians; followers of ancient traditions such as Taoism and of teachings going back to Paleolithic times-- all are attempting to express the same insight."

There's one more aspect of Midnight Wisdom which needs to be mentioned here: the Sensation function's focus on details. Just as in the New Cosmology we see that it's a distortion of the cosmic process to exclude anyone or any thing from our care, so we can see that in terms of Sophia as Caretaker, nothing should to be overlooked in the long run, no one left out.

With all this in mind, we can re-word the question about whether we have a future in terms of Sophia as Protector, Provider and Caretaker: Will Divine Wisdom be consistent in the long run?

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In asking the question that way, it's important to keep in mind just what the long run looks like:

1. The world is dynamic, not static. "Being is continuously evolving."
2. The basic sequence of cosmic evolution is "matter, life, mind." In the big picture we see that human beings are "the world become conscious of itself." Persons are the matter of the world responding to itself by way of the structures and activities of the human brain.
3. In the cosmic process there is also culture, what I called in previous posts "the other half of person." Personal relationships, human community and our union with all else are also part of the evolution of the universe.
4. The Judeo-Christian tradition at the heart of western religion originally saw itself as the growing edge of that communal developmental process. In the context of the Bible's Wisdom perspectives, western religion saw the Hebrew prophets, Jesus, and the communities of his followers as the growing edge of cultural evolution, the continuation on Earth of the communal and cosmic stage of the world's development.

Western culture and religion lost this dynamic perspective for nearly a thousand years, and because modern science came into existence during that time, science too lacked the dynamic perspective for a while. But in our day, the big picture of the cosmic process has been recovered once again by both religion and science.

Today, we can recognize not only that we are associated with the destiny of the universe, but that as individuals we each have a unique contribution to make to it, and that our communal work towards peace and justice, equality and environmental consciousness is an integral part of it. We can also see today, as never before, that precisely because war, injustice and environmental damage prevent human beings from making their unique contribution to the evolution of the world that those things are distortions of the development of God's creation.

So in asking if we have a future, we're asking not only whether the cosmic process continues but also whether we can look for something else as well-- nothing less than a healing of the fragmentation we experience in our individual and social lives.

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In Christian tradition, the word used to name this healing wholeness which our minds and hearts look for is "salvation." It comes from the Latin word "salve," a word we still use for healing/medical ointments. In Greek, the word used is soterion, from soteria (desirable things), the opposite of phobia (things we fear). The basic idea in this understanding of salvation is that, as participants in the cosmic process, we can look for the healing and wholeness of all things, that in the long run we don't need to be afraid.

So in the evolutionary context, the question of whether we have a future comes down to whether we can count on the cosmic process for that healing and wholeness in the long run.

As I said earlier, there's no evidence. Nothing from the Thinking function. And if we do have a future, we have no information about the details. Nothing from the Sensation function, either.

But while the patriarchal mentality of static dualism writes off the other two functions of our four-fold consciousness as irrelevant or even as non-existent, it is via our Black Bear Intuition that we desire "our completion and fulfillment" and it's via our Green Mouse Feeling that we hope for "the persistence of our relationships beyond the passing away of things."

These two aspects of our consciousness also come from the cosmic process, no less than do our Gold Eagle Thinking and White Buffalo Sensation functions. It is via us that the universe expects to be "salved." And we experience that expectation in ourselves as a promise. It is a cosmic imperative much like what researchers in the human sciences call the "cognitive imperative." I originally described the "cognitive imperative" back in post #10 (Overview of Biogenetic Structuralism).
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The word "imperative" generally means an urge or impetus, an inner drive, something which is unavoidably necessary, like the pull of gravity. Here it refers to how the universe is ordered, and "cognitive imperative" refers to the fact that "cognition," human consciousness, results from the way the universe works.

This is such an important idea, with regard to the question of a future, that I want to offer some examples of the "cognitive imperative" at different levels of human development.

Months before we are born, the cosmic process is active in the embryological development of our brain and nervous system. Biogenetic structuralist scientists describe it this way: "The initial development of each nerve cell (in the brain) is motivated by a cosmic imperative to be active and 'reach out,' to contact and communicate with certain other cells."

At a later stage in our personal development, the same cognitive imperative is described as "the uniquely human, hardwired instinct to link cause with effect that gave us a vital evolutionary advantage over other animal species." That sounds complicated, but it simply refers to the fact that our minds look for explanations of things. When we hear a loud noise, for example, we automatically (instinctively) ask, "What was that?" The point is that it's not only a unique aspect of human consciousness to look for reasons for things but that the source of that cognitive imperative in us is the evolutionary process itself.

A third example comes from our understanding of adult psychological development; it has to do with the inner drive we experience to bring together the many aspects of our conscious awareness. In Jungian language it's described as our need to unify the various aspects of our conscious and unconscious (the Jungian "complexes") into a whole. Jungians would say that we experience within ourselves "a strong drive toward individuation." The biogenetic structuralists put it this way: "The wholistic imperative of the cosmic life-force also wants the psyche to integrate into consciousness those until now previously excluded complexes."

The point of these examples of the cognitive imperative-- this "primal urge to know," as biogenetic structuralists also call it-- is that this cosmic life-force, this "primordial cosmic dynamis," is both the way the world works and the way our hearts and minds work. It's not just the cosmic process working in us, but-- because we are the world become conscious of itself-- the cognitive imperative is nothing less than the "primordial cosmic dynamis" working as us.

So, when we look at the question of a future in this context, we can see that just as there is a cognitive imperative, there is also what might be called an "expectation imperative." We humans-- as the universe become conscious of itself-- find in ourselves a desire for completion, an instinct for fulfillment. We're hard-wired for it.

But it's not just our own expectation-- it is the expectation of the universe itself. Via us, the created world is expecting to have a future.

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Since I started this blog two years ago to share my thoughts about the convergence of science and religion I have pointed out many times that the evolutionary understanding of the world which characterizes modern science has its roots in the Western religious tradition.

Here I want also to point out that, as unlikely as it may seem to many, even this idea that the universe itself expects to have a future has been part of the Western religious tradition from the very beginning of Christianity. Although in the context of static dualism we miss it completely, the earliest Christian writer, Paul, makes the point explicitly in his letter to the Romans.

Paul says as clearly as possible that creation itself-- the whole universe, all of nature-- is "groaning as if in labor pains in expectation of its fulfillment." The many translations are fascinating. You might like to check Romans 8:22 on Bible Gateway. I especially like the version known as "The Message." In that translation Paul simply says, "The universe is pregnant."

So, just as there is a "cognitive imperative" recognized by western science, there is also what might be called an "expectation imperative" recognized by western religion.

The universe is expecting!

And it's that expectation which we experience in ourselves, via our Green Mouse and Black Bear functions, as the promise of a future. When we look at the big picture, in terms of the "Wisdom from on high who orders all things mightily," there doesn't seem to be any reason to mistrust it.

sam@macspeno.com

#46. Convergence?

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My previous eight posts have been about Divine Wisdom. That's a lot. But I think it's worth the time and effort because even though it's relatively unfamiliar to most thoughtful persons, the understanding of the anthropos-theos relationship presented in the Hebrew Bible's wisdom literature lies at the heart of our western religious tradition.

The fact that it's unfamiliar is an advantage. It allows us to hear what the wisdom tradition is saying without too much interference by a carry-over of the prejudices that have built up over the centuries in western culture with regard to religion. Those prejudices include fundamentalist dualism and scientific rationalism. Along with patriarchy-- and its exploitation of just about everything-- they are baggage left over from the static worldview of classical Greek thought.

In contrast, the worldview of the wisdom literature is dynamic. It sees Sophia delighting in the creation of the Earth and the world of human persons-- guiding us, directing us, providing for us, and calling us to participate in her creative work in the world.

Jesus was born into that dynamic worldview of Divine Wisdom and it is the context in which the first communities of his followers were formed. In the next two posts I hope to describe what the appearance of Jesus and those early Christian communities looks like when we see it in the dynamic context of the Bible's wisdom tradition.

In this post I want to share some specific thoughts about the significance of the contemporary convergence of those dynamic religious perspectives and the evolutionary perspectives of modern science.

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One of my main reasons for starting this blog back in December 2006 was to share my understanding of the fact that the modern scientific perspectives have their roots in the very same dynamic perspectives that underlie the western religious tradition.

I've noted repeatedly that the evolutionary worldview began with the history of the Hebrew people at the time of the Exodus and that it was a quite different outlook on life than the static worldview that previously had prevailed for many thousands of years.

I've often quoted Teilhard de Chardin's statement that the change from a static to a dynamic worldview is the most significant change in human consciousness since consciousness first appeared on the Earth several million years ago.

So, I'm calling this post "Convergence?"-- with emphasis on the question mark-- because I want to talk here about why that convergence isn't clear to most people.

If the evolutionary perspective is at the core of both western science and western religion, what happened? Why is religion still considered to be opposed to science? If the Judeo-Christian tradition and modern science share the same worldview, why does the scientific perspective seem to be in such contradiction to the western world's religious tradition?

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It's important to note that I am not asking "Are science and religion compatible?" I'm asking "Why is it that so many people still think that science and religion are incompatible?"

It's also important to note that when I talk about the convergence of science and religion, I don't mean that science and religion somehow are merging into the one same thing. They are clearly two very different aspects of human life.

The best way I know how to describe the distinction is to say that science is about the anthropos-cosmos relationship, while religion is about the anthropos-theos relationship. And, as I've spelled out in many previous posts, I find the quaternary perspectives of our four-fold mind to be especially helpful tools for understanding that difference.

One way to express the difference, for example, is to use the imagery of the four directions on the Medicine Wheel. Science is a primarily a Gold Eagle and White Buffalo expression of our conscious minds, while religion is primarily a Black Bear and Green Mouse activity.

In Jungian language, both science and religion operate from one perception function and one judgment function, something like the old "one from column A and one from column B" idea.

Science operates by way of the perception function called Sensation and the judgment function called Thinking. Science looks at fact and details; it's always questioning and trying to formulate conceptual explanations of what it sees. It is concerned with the physical universe of matter, life and mind. Science focuses on understanding the world we live in.

Religion, in contrast, operates by way of the perception function called Intuition and the judgment function called Feeling. When it looks at the big picture of the world, it strongly values and wants to hold on to the many good things it sees, and is especially concerned with the connections between things and their significance for us. And in major contrast to our scientific effort, religion expresses its insights in images rather than concepts.

The basic Medicine Wheel teaching is that we need to make use of all four activities of our personal consciousness. If we don't, if we get stuck at one place on the circle of life, we become lopsided, out of balance-- out of harmony, not at peace.

Another helpful tool for understanding the difference between religion and science is Karl Rahner's existential analysis of human experience. I've mentioned Rahner in many posts and spelled out his existential views in post #34 (Talking About Us). At our deepest level of personal experience, says Rahner, we experience ourselves as aware, free, open and blessed.

Using this experiential language we can say that religion comes from (and at its best emphasizes) the human experience of being open and related to the things of the world, while science, in contrast, comes from (and at its best emphasizes) our experience of being free participants in the life of the world.

From these various perspectives of personal experience and four-fold consciousness, it's obvious that there's no reason for us to become lopsided. We don't have to choose between religion and science. So, once again, What happened? How did two large groups of mostly good-willed people in our culture get so out of balance with one another? How did they get stuck at such different places on the circle of life?

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To understand what happened, we need a few facts about the history behind the opposition between religion and science.

I need first to point out that it's not quite correct to say that the Judeo-Christian tradition began in the context of the dynamic-evolutionary worldview. More accurately, the dynamic worldview is the very essence of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

That may seem like a strange claim, but that's because we're still not yet comfortable with the idea of a dynamic-- in contrast to a static-- worldview.

In Greek, dynamis means power and energy. It's the origin of words like "dynamo" and "dynamite." The Latin spiritus is a synonym. It goes back to a Sanskrit word used to describe the movement of the wind and air. It's this spirit-- air, wind, energy-- in us that makes us alive. And it's the same divine spiritus, "the dynamis of God," that's described in the first chapter of Genesis as "hovering over the surface of the waters" and which, in the psalms, is said to "fill the whole world" and "give life to all living creatures."

The Psalms and the book of Genesis were written long after the Hebrew experience of the Exodus. Those stories and poems are part of the wisdom perspective that pervades the Hebrew Bible. The entire wisdom tradition speaks of the dynamis-- the energy or power-- of God bringing us to be, guiding us, gathering us, providing for us. The whole history of the Jewish people is understood as being brought about by this holy spiritus.

In the gospel stories, the same divine dynamis shows itself in Jesus. It specifically appears in the unique story of his baptism when it leads him into the dessert in preparation for his life's work. At the last supper, this same divine power is promised to his followers, and the earliest Christian communities saw themselves called together by the same spiritus of God at the feast of Pentecost

This dynamis-and-Sophia perspective, so unfamiliar to us today, prevailed for roughly the first thousand years of Christianity. So, again, What happened?

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We have to keep in mind that western culture includes not only the heritage of the Hebrews but also that of the Greeks, and the Greeks had a static worldview. What happened was that after the Dark Ages, the dynamic perspective of the Judeo-Christian tradition was lost to western culture when the static-dualistic worldview took over.

And in that static worldview, it's difficult to understand the human spirit except as something separate from the world. Dualism sees the human spiritus as alien to the Earth; it has a negative view of the spirit/soul as something trapped in a body and needing to escape from the material world. The static worldview and dualism go together.

The key to understanding the opposition of religion to science is the fact that, as a human enterprise, modern science began during the time when static dualism prevailed in western culture.

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Once again, the quaternary understanding of the four-fold mind is helpful. Because science comes from our White Buffalo and Gold Eagle functions, it is especially concerned with the details of the world we live in and is continually asking questions about it. Science begins with awe and wonder-- with amazement at the world we live in-- and with the desire to know and understand it. So from the start science stood in opposition to that dualism which had come to pervade western culture and which sees the world as an evil place we need to escape from.

And because of its efforts to understand the world, science quickly discovered the fact that the world isn't static. Long before the time of Charles Darwin, early scientists working in what today we would call the fields of astronomy, geology and biology recognized that the world we live in is an always-changing, always-developing-- indeed, evolutionary-- world.

So science found itself in opposition to the religious dualism of western culture in two specific ways: not only because it values the world which religious dualism distains, but also because it recognizes what western religion forgot-- that that world is not static but dynamic.

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As I mentioned in post #33 (Talking About God), around the time of the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species the western religious tradition also begin to recover its dynamic-evolutionary roots. But because religion is far less concerned with questioning than is science, religion moved much more slowly in recovering its own dynamic worldview.

Most people have yet to become aware of this century-and-a-half movement in western religion. They are still focused on what they see as the opposition of science and religion.

Although since the late 1800s some religious thinkers have been trying to show that religion and science aren't incompatible, progress has been slow. Even today we still hear the question, "Are science and religion compatible?" as if it was a brand new idea.

The loss of the Bible's dynamic worldview has been so thorough that many people today still can ask and mean it sincerely, "Can a Christian believe in evolution?" And they are simply bewildered by the thought that the idea of evolution not only comes from the Bible, that it is what the Judeo-Christian tradition is all about.

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There has been progress, however. Five hundred years ago religious authorities told people not to believe the finding of scientists that the Earth revolved around the sun. Today, that's no longer an issue.

Two hundred years ago, religious authorities told people not to believe the finding of scientists that life emerged out of the pre-existing matter of the Earth or that it evolved by the natural selection process into the life-forms we know today. That's still an issue, to be sure, but for the most part, it's no longer the central issue-- even though the media still talks about it as if it is.

In our day the issue that continues to cause people to think religion and science are incompatible is nothing less than ourselves. Not planets or plants and animals but the uniqueness of human consciousness is what makes people still think we have to choose between science and religion.

The problem is commonly expressed by religious fundamentalists as, "I can see that it's possible that some animals may have evolved from lower animals-forms, but I can't believe that humans came from monkeys." They say, in brief, that "humans have a soul-- and animals don't."

This is where neurological science-- the study of the human brain and nervous system-- comes in. The main issue now isn't how the planets are arranged around the sun, or how life first emerged on Earth, but how the human brain can give rise to the human spirit.

The difficulty is that, in a static perspective, it can't. There is no way that the emergence of mind from matter can happen in a static worldview. In a static world, nothing new emerges.

So the real problem is the idea of emergence. I used the word "emergence" several times in what I've had to say so far in the post. It probably didn't stand out, but it's the key to understanding the incompatibility of the static and dynamic worldviews.

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In a dynamic context, we can see patterns that we miss in a static worldview.

We can see, for example, that the chemical elements emerged from the nuclear processes in the hearts of stars; we can see that when that the stardust of chemical elements and compounds is collected by gravity it forms into planets; and we can see that living cells emerge from the interaction and combination of the complex chemicals of those planets.

The pattern is clear enough: when the material of the world reaches a certain level of complexity, something new emerges. That-- as we Earthlings experience it-- is the underlying structure to the entire cosmic process. In a static worldview, we just don't see this pattern, but in a dynamic context, it's obvious: at higher levels of complexity, something new emerges.

And it's this pattern which continues in the emergence of mind from the combination and interactions of our living brain cells.

The best elementary example I can give of emergence is one that's familiar to almost everyone nowadays: the fact that the when the two elements, hydrogen gas and oxygen gas, are combined chemically-- not just mixed-- the result is the emergence of a new compound, water, with totally different characteristic properties from its chemical components.

If we say that water is "only" hydrogen and oxygen, we miss the point that something new emerged. Water can do things that oxygen atoms and hydrogen atoms can't. The idea is even more clear if we try to reduce a complex chemical compound like DNA to "only" carbon, nitrogen and oxygen atoms. DNA can do things that the atoms of carbon, nitrogen and oxygen can't. Among other things, DNA can replicate itself, and self-replication is one of the basic characteristics of living things.

"Emergence" is the term used to describe the appearance of this more than-- this "newness"-- that results from increasingly complex combinations of things. The idea of "emergence" simply doesn't make sense in a static perspective. If there's no developmental change, there can be no emergence of anything.

But, as in the dynamic perspective we can see that water is something more than its chemical components, and living cells are something more than chemical matter, so the human mind and spirit is something more than just the activity of brain cells. Persons are more-- much more-- than brain cells, but it is the brain cells out of which consciousness emerges.

It's the level of complexity that makes all the difference. Two atoms combining to form a molecule is one thing. The billions of cells in our brain-- in touch with both the outside world through our senses and in touch with one another via electrochemical links-- is something else.

Scientists have been studying that complexity for more than a century; it is beyond anything else known in the whole universe.

So, in the static worldview, there is "no way that human beings could have evolved from monkeys." But when we recognize the pattern of emergence in the dynamic worldview, we can see that it takes nothing away from our human dignity and uniqueness to understand that our personal awareness emerges from the activity of those extremely complex structures.

Indeed, just the opposite.

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Because the idea of emergence is the key to understanding the difference between the static and dynamic worldviews, it's also the key to understanding why it is not religion but the static worldview that is in opposition to science's evolutionary perspectives.

My main idea in this post is that it's not science which contradicts religion. Rather, it is the dynamic worldview of science that contradicts the old static perspective of dualistic religion.

And it is the understanding of reality as a dynamic process that's at the core of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition. It is precisely this evolutionary view that makes the western religious tradition different from all the other religious traditions of the Earth. As I said earlier, I hope to spell out that idea in a future post.

I have one final point to make in this post. When we see that the real world is a process, and that the emergence of new things from previous things is the basic pattern to the process, we can see that the convergence of science and religion in the dynamic worldview of western science frees western religion from the centuries-old prison of static dualism.

In the dynamic perspective it's clear that the world isn't a prison; indeed, thinking that the world is a prison is a prison. When we look at the world from the dynamic perspective, we see that far from being in opposition to religion, contemporary science is serving the religion of the western world by rescuing it from its thousand-year prison.

The evolutionary perspective helps western religion re-discover its own dynamic heart and soul. Modern science greatly enriches western culture's religious tradition.

That's what I mean by "convergence."

sam@macspeno.com