Monthly Archives: September 2019

September 26, 2019 – The Dimensions of Happiness

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Today’s Post

Last week we began a final look at happiness by recognizing that in spite of the confusing, often negative and frequently irrelevant nature of our Western religious lore, much can still be found that provides insight into both our personal development and our social welfare.

Over the past several weeks we have looked at the concept and experience of personal happiness from three viewpoints: material, evolutionary and ‘spiritual’. As we have seen, this term, ‘spiritual’, loses its religious connotation when put in the secular evolutionary context of Teilhard de Chardin and seen in the daily posts of Richard Rohr. In this context, spirituality is simply the agency of continued complexity, the sap of the tree of cosmic evolution, as it manifests itself in the branches of our own human and societal evolution.

Last week we looked a little deeper at how Paul’s ‘repacking’ of Jesus’ teaching, while couched in the religious vernacular of the time, can be reinterpreted into secular terms which reflect the presence of the ‘agency of continued complexity’ in our lives. We saw how Teilhard’s essential mapping of the three fundamental ‘vectors’ of cosmic evolution (forward, upward, inward) are succinctly captured in Paul’s ‘Theological Virtues’ of Faith, Hope and Love.

This week we will look into another example of such exploration.

The “Fruit of the Spirit”

As we discussed above, the term ‘spirit’ is used here to refer to that current which rises through cosmic evolution in which all things increase in complexity as they evolve Restating Teilhard’s understanding of ‘spirituality’,

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us; it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach, in the wake of the movement that is drawing us forward.  ..it is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’.  Nothing more; and also nothing less.  Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”

   Thus ‘spirituality’ can be seen, as Paul Davies puts it, as the ‘software’ by which the ‘hardware’ of matter increases in complexity over time.

This is the ‘hermeneutic’ which we have used throughout this blog to ‘reinterpret’ the tenets of Western religion as we approach the ‘filtering’ of it in search of how this ‘software’ is at work in our lives.

That said, the ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ is Paul’s term that sums up nine attributes of a person or community living ‘in accord with the Holy Spirit’, which of course in our lexicon is reinterpreted as ‘in accordance with the evolutionary agency of complexification’.  As Paul lists the facets of this ‘fruit’: “..the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”  Among the many attempts to objectively quantify the attributes of a ‘full’ or complete human life, one in which some degree of happiness could be expected, these seem high on the list. From our approach to the concept of human happiness, such completeness is an essential factor.

Love –  We have addressed the attribute of love several times in this blog, contrasting the traditional understanding of it as the emotion by which we are attracted to each other and Teilhard’s insight that it is a manifestation of the universal evolutive energy by which things become more complex, and hence more united over time in such a way to recursively become more complete.  By participating in love we become more complete, more whole, and as we do we increase our capacity for love. Love is the evolutionary ‘glue’ that unites us in such a way that we ascend the spiral of evolution.

Peace –  It is hard to imagine anything more conducive to happiness than peace, which comes from the recognition that our efforts to grow more complete are underwritten by a universal energy which rises unbidden and unearned within us.  From this standpoint, God, as Blondel understood ‘Him’, is on our side. Life, as it is offered to us as a gift, is guaranteed to be open to our strivings, and welcoming to our labors.  As the Ground of Being is uncovered as active in our own personal ground of existence, it is understood more as father than as fate.

Patience – Patience becomes more than long-suffering, teeth gritting endurance necessary for ‘salvation’, but the natural acceptance of what cannot be changed in light of Teilhard’s “.. current to the open sea” on which we are carried when we “…set our sails to the winds of life.” As we have seen, John Haught sets great store on patience as a stance or attitude that we begin to master as anticipation replaces dread as our sense of the future. Recognition of the Cosmic Spark within us, the ‘gifted’ nature of it, and confidence in where it is taking us, can instill in us a patience with the vagaries of life that would have been previously considered to be naive.

Kindness – As an essential building block of both society and personal relationships, kindness is prescribed by nearly every religion as the basis of the ‘Golden Rule’.  Beyond this prescription is the natural emergence of kindness as a recognition that not only are we underpinned by the Cosmic Spark, but others are as well.  Treating others as we would be treated requires us to be aware of how our own Cosmic Spark is the essence of being by which we all participate in Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’.

Goodness –  Goodness, of course, is that tricky concept which underlays all the ‘fruits’ of Paul.  In Paul, as echoed by Teilhard, that which is ‘good’ is simply that which moves us ahead, both as individuals and members of our societies.  If we are to have ‘abundance’ of life, whatever contributes to such abundance is ‘good’.

Faithfulness – As we saw in our look at the Theological Virtues, faith is much more than intellectual and emotional adherence to doctrines or dogmas as criteria for entry into ‘the next life’.  Faith has an ontological character by which we understand ourselves to be caught up in a ‘process’ which lifts us from the past and prepares us for a future that while unknown is nevertheless fully manageable and completely trustworthy.

Gentleness – As a mirror to ‘goodness’, gentleness, once we have become aware of the Cosmic Spark not only in ourselves but in all others, becomes the only authentic way of relating to others.

Self-Control – Self-control acknowledges that while we might be caught up in a process by which we become what it is possible to become, its continuation is dependent upon our ability and willingness to choose.  Being carried by Teilhard’s ‘current’ (‘Patience’, above) still requires us to develop the skills of ‘sail setting’ and ‘wind reading’.  The instinctual stimuli of the reptilian and limbic brains do not dissipate as we grow, but the skill of our neocortex brains to modulate them must be judiciously developed. As we develop the skill of ‘thinking with the whole brain’ (6 July) our responses to the many stimuli of life become more appropriate to a universe which evolves as ‘the elaboration of more eyes in a world in which there is always more to see”.

Thus Paul’s ‘fruits’ aren’t independent. They represent the kaleidoscope of facets of being that emerge when we are ‘in synch’ with the ‘axis of evolution’. As Yuval Harari would have it, they result from our finding a ‘better fit’ into the milieu of human evolution, and overcoming the ‘existential angst’ resulting from our speedy departure from pre-human evolution. (August 1).

The Next Post

This week we took a second look at how traditional Western religious insights in to human life can be extracted from their traditional religious vernacular and understood in a secular context. This week, just as we saw last week, those insights proposed by Paul are easily placed in a secular evolutionary context when seen from the perspective of Teilhard’s evolutionary world view.

This, of course, is another example of Blondel’s approach to religion: in the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life. Or, as John Haught puts it

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

   This permits us to move, as John Haught suggests, from the “nonnatural mode of causation” fostered by traditional religion to one which not only is “linked..to the scientific story” but retains traditional religion’s emphasis on the human person (as understood by Thomas Jefferson). This emphasis can, in turn, sharpen the focus with which the human person is treated by traditional science.

Next week we will sum up our exploration of the human attribute of ‘happiness’.

September 19, 2019 – Can Religion Offer a Secular Basis for the Ground of Happiness?

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Today’s Post

Last week we returned to the idea of a ‘Terrain of Synergy’ in our continuing search for the ground of happiness. We looked this time from the perspective of John Haught, who compares and contrasts the legacy religious and scientific ‘Cosmic Stories’, but opens the door for an overlap. In his perspective, what is warranted as we participate in the flow of human evolution, is a spirit of ‘anticipation’: less a hand-wringing, indignant demand for faster progress than a realization of the progress that is being made and a recognition that such progress is in fact underway in our lives as well as our societies.

This week we will begin a search for nuggets of such overlap in our traditional Western religious lore, referred to by Haught as ‘analogy’, to sift its ore for the jewels of insight that it offers.

The Three Virtues Model

In the series of posts ((March, 2018) in which we looked at reinterpreting the concepts of Western theology, we addressed the idea of the ‘Theological Virtues’. Although they were first presented as such by Paul, in Teilhard’s spiral model they can be seen to offer much more relevance.

Just as we addressed the unique quality of the energy of human evolution as ‘spirituality’ in the context of secular phenomenon, we saw these three familiar ‘virtues’ as three ‘stances’ or ‘attitudes’ that we can take as we go about trying to live our lives in cooperation with Teilhard’s “winds of the Earth.”  And in the same way that Teilhard’s model of the convergent spiral can be applied to better understand universal evolution, the so called ‘theological’ virtues can be seen as fitting into this model as a secular guide to applying it to human life

As we have seen, the ‘spiral’ model applies equally throughout the process of universal evolution.  It works at the level of the atom just as it does at the level of the human, and as Teilhard insists, it can be trusted to be active in human evolution as it continues to unfold.

The ‘virtues Model’, however, works uniquely at the level of the human, but is nonetheless an example of how universal processes can be seen to continue to work in the ‘noosphere’.  These three ‘virtues’ are the equivalent of the three universal attributes of the spiral as active in the human person:  unity, response to evolutional energy and the resultant rise in complexity.

The first of the three human components of this converging spiral is ‘Love’, the component of unity.  As we have addressed in many places in this Blog, Teilhard’s assertion that the idea of love must be freed from its popular understanding as a strong emotion and allowed to flower as the energy of evolution which unites its products in ways that increase their complexity and thus completes them.  Love is less an act of emotion or instinct that encourages our relationships and more one of uniting us in such a way that we become more what it is possible for us to become.  To Teilhard, love is ‘ontological’: to love is to become.  It is the energy which unites us in such a way as to move us forward on the spiral.

The second component is that of ‘Faith’.   Faith is the pull of our lives toward the axis of evolution and hence the human response to the universal evolutional principle of complexification.

As we become more adept at ‘articulating the noosphere’, we begin to better understand the structure and the workings of the reality in which we are enmeshed.  Such articulations of the universe will be undermined, however, if they are not preceded by a ‘faith’ that they exist at all.

While this might sound religious, let me offer a secular example. Imagine if Newton had not begun his inquiry into the workings of matter with the belief that there was some objective, measurable and most of all ‘intelligible’ force which moved material objects from their static state before he formulated his theory of gravitational attraction. His extrapolation to the belief that nature itself was ‘intelligible’ was an essential step towards the ‘Prinicpia’.

Faith therefore is the first step toward increasing our grasp of reality and enhancing our response to the energy of evolution.

The third of these three components is ‘Hope’, which encourages us on our journey toward our potential for increased complexity as we move forward on the spiral.  One of the gifts of evolution in the human is the ability to look into the future, as murky and risky as that might be, based on our understanding of the past.  If our look into the future is pessimistic and without hope, such negativity saps our energy and inhibits our movement up the spiral, toward a future in which we perceive the results of our growth as bleak, the fruit of our love as rejection, and sees us as hopelessly inadequate to build a full life.  Without hope, the evolutionary power of love, itself guaranteed over the fourteen or so billion years of universal becoming, is diminished.   Hope is that component of evolution by which we ‘rise’ as we move forward on the spiral.

John Haught’s concept of ‘anticipation’ as the most fruitful ground of belief addresses all three of these ‘virtues’, but Love and Hope resound the clearest. If we are to face the future with ‘anticipation’ we must first have faith that there is something to indeed anticipate and hope that it will live up to our anticipation.

The Next Post

This week we saw how Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’ of evolution: Forward, Inward and Upward, present in every stage of evolution, can be seen to be at work in the human person. Further, we saw how the ‘humanization’ of these three vectors can be seen in Paul’s idea of the “Theological Virtues”. As seen by Paul and stressed by Teilhard, forward, inward and upward manifest themselves in human life as Love, Faith and Hope.

This, of course, is another example of Blondel’s approach to religion: in the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life. Or, as John Haught puts it

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

   This permits us to move, as John Haught suggests, from the “nonnatural mode of causation” fostered by traditional religion to one which not only is “linked..to the scientific story” but retains traditional religion’s emphasis on the human person (as understood by Thomas Jefferson). This emphasis can, in turn, soften the vagueness with which the human person is treated by traditional science.

Next week we will continue our search for nuggets of noospheric insight among the teachings of religion.

September 12, 2019 – How Does the Terrain of Synergy Provide a Ground of Happiness?

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw how Teilhard’s model of the ‘spiral of evolution’ offers insight into how the wellsprings of cosmic evolution not only rise through the strata of existence, but can be seen as active in both our lives and in society.

This week we will take a look at how our two traditional ‘cosmic stories’ can become more comprehensive, and act as an agency for human happiness, by seeing them in the context of ‘The Terrain of Synergy’.

Telling The Cosmic Story

We have seen in many segments of this blog how our collective understanding of the cosmos, what we understand of it and how our understanding of it affects both the living of our lives and our participation in the larger society. We have also noted the many dualisms that face us as we attempt to integrate principles of wholeness into our lives. Science and religion obviously represent a rich source of concepts which we can use, but at the same time, both within themselves and between themselves, can be found many contradictions and concepts neither helpful nor relevant to our life.

John Haught, Research Professor at Georgetown University, offers a way to look at this situation from the center of what we have been referring to as the ‘Terrain of Synergy’. In his perspective, outlined in his book, “The New Cosmic Story”, science and religion offer our two traditional ways of telling the ‘Cosmic Story’.

In this book, he critiques the stories traditionally told by science and religion, and argues for a third story which offers an integrated perspective on what is clearly an integrated cosmos.

He stands well back from the traditional stories, and understands them as two categories of lore which address the same thing: the cosmos.

  • The first category he labels as “archaeonomy” which is the traditional, empirically-based story told by science.
  • The second category is the story told by traditional, intuition-based religion, which he labels, “analogy”
  • The third story is the one slowly emerging today as we learn more about the universe, which he labels, “anticipation”

These three categories of stories serve not only as a taxonomy of stories of the cosmos, but also as a guide to understanding our place within it. In this he echoes Teilhard, Paul Davies, Jonathan Sacks and Richard Rohr, all of whom we have met in previous posts.

The Archaenomic Story

We have looked with some detail at the story which mainstream science tells, particularly at how science seems to be marking time at the phenomenon of the human person. In Haught’s telling, and in implicit agreement with Davies,

“The obvious fact of emergence- the arrival of unpredictable new organizational principles and patterns in nature- continues to elude human inquiry as long as it follows archaeonomic naturalism in reducing what is later-and-more in the cosmic process to what is earlier-and-simpler.  A materialist reading of nature leads our minds back down the corridor of cosmic time to a state of original subatomic dispersal- that is to a condition of physical de-coherence.”

   And, recognizing this ‘corridor’ as Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’, he goes on to say

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (eg consciousness aware of itself) has been part of the universe from the start. So hidden is this interior side of the cosmos from public examination that scientists and philosophers with materialist leanings usually claim it has no real existence.” (Parentheses mine)

He notes “…how little illumination materialistic readings of nature have shed not only on religion but also on life, mind, morality and other emergent phenomena.”

And, I would add, how little illumination on human happiness.

The Analogic Story

He is neither sparing of the traditional religious telling of the ‘Cosmic Story’

“Analogy has appealed to religious people for centuries, but it remains intellectually plausible only so long as the universe is taken to be immobile. Once we realize that nature is a gradually unfolding narrative, we cannot help noticing that more is indeed coming into the story out of less over the course of time, and that it does so without miraculous interruptions and without disturbing invariant physical and chemical principles. It is intellectually plausible only as long as the universe is taken to be immobile.”

The Inadequacy of the Two Stories

He notes how neither of the two legacy ‘Cosmic Stories’ are satisfactory today.

“If the analogical reading is unbelievable- since it has to bring in supernatural causes to explain how more-being gets into the natural world- the archaeonomic reading is even less believable since it cannot show how the mere passage of time accounts for the fuller-being that gradually emerges.

   If analogy cannot make the emergence of life and mind intelligible without bringing in a non-natural mode of causation that lifts the whole mass up from above, archaeonomy is even less intellectually helpful in assuming that all true causes are ultimately mindless physical events, hence that life and mind are not really anything more than their inanimate constituents.”

But closer to the focus of our search for a story which is more relevant to our lives

“Both archaeonomic cosmic pessimism and analogical otherworldly optimism, by comparison, are expressions of impatience.”

   Impatience- indignant dissatisfaction with our state and that of the environment which surrounds us- is one element of our ‘existential anxiety’. Haught’s insight into this condition explains why neither the comfort provided by religion in the past or the intellectual satisfaction promised by technology for the future are working to ease such a condition. 

The Anticipation Story

In the third category of ‘Cosmic Story’, Haught is suggesting a confluence between science and religion that builds on their strengths and ‘filters’ out their shortcomings.

“Anticipation offers a coherent alternative to both analogy and archaeonomy. It reads nature, life, mind and religion as ways in which a whole universe is awakening to the coming of more-being on the horizon. It accepts both the new scientific narrative of gradual emergence and the sense that something ontologically richer and fuller is coming into the universe in the process.”

   He proposes that such an approach to the nature of the cosmos also can bring about a profound sense of ‘belonging’ once we begin to trust the upwelling of wholeness warranted by fourteen or so billion years of ‘complexification’.

“An anticipatory reading of the cosmic story therefore requires a patient forbearance akin to the disposition we must have when reading any intriguing story. Reading the cosmic story calls for a similar kind of waiting, a policy of vigilance inseparable from what some religious traditions call faith. Indeed, there is a sense in which faith, as I use the term…, is patience”.

   Thus the anticipatory approach to the cosmic story requires a certain patience with the process of complexification, certain in the belief that the future is better than the past. Placing the universe in the context of becoming requires us to understand that

“Not-yet, however, is not the same as non-being. It exists as a reservoir of possibilities that have yet to be actualized. It is a realm of being that has future as its very essence.”

Patricia Allerbee, whom we have met previously, echoes this perspective

“..the long history of rising universal complexity suggests that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”. To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

   And, as John Haught advises, “to anticipate with patience”.

The Next Post

This week we have returned to the idea of a ‘Terrain of Synergy’ in our search for the ground of happiness, this time from the perspective of John Haught, who contrasts the legacy religious and scientific ‘Cosmic Stories’, but suggests areas of overlap. In his perspective, what is warranted as we participate in the flow of human evolution, is a spirit of ‘anticipation’: less a hand-wringing, indignant demand for faster progress than a realization of the progress that is being made and a recognition that Allerbee’s ‘optimization’ is in fact underway in our lives as well as our societies.

Next week we will look into the traditional Western religious lore, referred to by Haught as ‘analogy’ to sift its ore for the jewels of insight that it offers this exploration.

September 5, 2019 – Articulating the ‘Spiritual’ Basis of the Ground of Happiness

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Today’s Post

Last week we traced the ‘spiritual ground of happiness’ to the ‘terrain of synergy’ between science and religion. At the center of this terrain, the concept that opens the door to an overlap between science and religion points the way to a truly integrated mode of human existence, is ‘Increasing complexity’.

We saw Yuval Noah Harari’s insight that our human capacities can alienate us from our evolutionary legacy connection with our environment   But we also recognized that, contrary to his dystopian forecast, as we become more integrated and more whole in our individual lives and in our collective societies, we can come to recognize our true connection to the wellsprings of the cosmos. Or, as Teilhard puts it:

“..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is made human in him.”

   This week we will look further into Teilhard’s understanding of the structure of the cosmos in such a way as to justify such strong confidence.

Teilhard’s Simple Picture of Cosmic Evolution

As we saw in our look at the structure of cosmic evolution (November, 2018), Teilhard envisions evolution proceeding throughout the cosmos from the ‘big bang’ in the form of a ‘convergent spiral’. As the products of evolution replicate themselves through joining and producing ‘offspring’ (eg atoms from electrons), they also experience a ‘rise’ in their complexity. Thus as they proceed ‘forward’ along the spiral, they experience an ‘upward’ effect as their complexity and ability to unite increases. This increase in complexity can be seen as a response to a universal force seen in a third agent whose direction is ‘inward’, hence the decreasing diameter of the spiral: its ‘convergence’.

With these three forces, forward, upward and inward, applying to every product of evolution in every age of the universe, Teilhard identifies the structure of cosmic evolution as it moves forward in the direction of increased complexity.

Teilhard also notes that not only does the diameter of the spiral decrease with time, it decreases ‘exponentially’: the rate of convergence increases over time.

This isn’t, of course, religion in any form. It is simply a way of looking at scientifically accumulated and empirical data in a different way. The data by which the history of evolution is categorized becomes much more straightforward when the ‘characteristic of complexity’ is recognized, and as we have seen, ultimately opens the door to science’s addressing of the human person.

Once the phenomenon of ‘increasing complexity’ is recognized in its universal context, all things in the cosmos become both inextricably linked and thus increasingly intelligible. Humans therefore become a valid subject of science once their place in the universal ‘hierarchy of being’ is recognized.

That said, however, the problem still obtains that once the threshold of ‘consciousness aware of itself’ is crossed, it becomes difficult to study human evolution outside of the conventional Darwinist paradigm of ‘Natural Selection”, which reduces humans to simple molecular activities under the influence of such things as ‘chance’ and ‘survival’.

Teilhard’s unique model of the ‘convergent spiral’ overcomes this barrier. His three ‘vectors’ of ‘forward’, ‘upward’ and ‘inward’ apply equally to every stage of universal evolution and to every new state of energy and matter that results from it.

Science has little difficulty understanding the transition from pure energy (at the ‘big bang)’ through the evolution of complex molecules, as the ‘Standard Theory’ of Physics outlines. The transition to the cell, and the latter (and quicker) transition to consciousness are more difficult, and by the time we get to ‘consciousness aware of itself’, all bets are off. This is the main reason why the last stage is so poorly addressed by science. Humans are either ‘epi-phenomenon’ or simply the result of pure chance; either way they are off limits as such.

If science avoids addressing the human phenomenon, how can we apply Teilhard’s tri-vector conception of evolution to its rise through the human?

The Spiral Of Evolution in the Human

If we believe that the universe is evolving along the three ‘vectors’ of Teilhard’s spiral model, then we should be able to find examples of how they are playing out in human history. As we have seen, science so far has been of little help.

Early last May we took an extensive look at how this spiral can be seen at work in the human person. Our personal (and cultural) evolution can hence be seen as a continuation of universal evolution as we (in Teilhard’s terms)

“…continually find new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space” by “a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

High minded words indeed. Can we find examples? Consider Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, which, in implicit agreement with Teilhard, does indeed offer both insight as well as articulation.

We first looked at Norberg’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’ which clearly and objectively show an exponential increase in human welfare (and hence human evolution) since 1850, and in which he cites instances of the activity outlined by Teilhard in the above quote.   In all nine of the areas of such ‘arrangements’, he cites the increased Western value of human freedom as the underlying causality.

This finding illustrates the action of Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’ of the spiral:

–          Fruitful Unity: Each step of the exponential increase described by Norberg is precipitated by an action of human collective insight, a sharp and clear example of human relationships as the locus of the energy of evolution manifesting itself in the human. Unity is the first vector- that which connects the products of evolution to move them ‘forward’.

–          Resulting complexity: As a result of each step, the complexity of society can be seen to increase in terms of more efficient organization, the reduction of human ills such as wars, famine and disease, and increased human lifespan. Increasing complexity is the second vector, the ‘upward’ component.

  • Increasing response to the agency of universal complexification: Through the increases in education and communication since 1850, each new step of evolution provides a stage for the next as individual persons become better educated at the same time that collective society is raised to the next level. In such results can be seen the action of the ‘inward’ component.

The Next Post

This week we continued our exploration of the ‘spiritual’ ground of happiness, noting that this ‘ground’ is located within the ‘terrain of synergy’. Once we begin to sense that the ‘ground of being’ is ‘on our side’, it becomes possible to build a level of confidence in the process of cosmic evolution as it rises through ourselves.

Having seen a clearer picture of this ‘terrain of synergy’ and its potential for a satisfaction with life that is grounded in a clear-headed, secular perspective, we can take our exploration of it yet a little further. Next week we will outline the dimensions of the ‘terrain of synergy’, and how it can be seen as the center-ground for the two traditional ways of ‘telling the cosmic story’.