Monthly Archives: December 2019

December 26, 2019 – The Secular Side of The Trinity

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Today’s Post

Last week we saw Jesus from our secular perspective, and noted how quickly the highly integrated understanding found in John became a victim of the endless human trend toward ‘dualism’. From our secular perspective, we saw how John’s vision strengthened the immediacy (immanence) of ‘the ground of being’ in human life and how Jesus was the ‘signpost’ for this spark of universal becoming which could be found in all the products of evolution, but only capable of being recognized as such by the human person.

This week we’ll take a look at the third stage of this unique evolution of the concept of God: the Trinity.

Today’s post is a summary of the posts from August 3 to August 17, 2017.

The History of the Trinity

As Bart Ehrman notes in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, unlike God and Jesus the Trinity isn’t addressed as such in any of the books of the Old or New Testament.   As we have seen, the understanding of God and Jesus in these books has evolved over time, but the concept of a ‘third person’ wasn’t developed until late in the first three hundred years of the new Christian church.

It wasn’t until this point in the evolution of the early church’s theology that this agent began to be considered divine in somehow the same way that Jesus was being considered.

In a nutshell, the new church began to consider God as being ‘triune’, somehow composed of three distinct but unified ‘persons’ whose agency in universal evolution was reflected in three separate ways. The most commonly used terms ‘Father’, ‘Son’ and ‘Spirit’, however, are of little help in achieving an integrated understanding of this complex concept. Thus in the same way that the church required belief without understanding as an ‘act of faith’ necessary for salvation (as in the belief that Jesus was both God and Man), it was soon to follow with the statement that God was also ‘three divine persons in one divine nature’.

And, in the same way that the controversy over the nature of Jesus was debated before the Nicene council, that of the Trinity continued to be debated. After the Arian controversy was resolved by the Nicean council, the debate moved from the deity of Jesus to the equality of the ‘Spirit’ with the ‘Father’ and ‘Son’. Was this new person, the ‘Spirit’, equal or inferior to the other two? How could it be integrated when it was absent from scripture?

This controversy was brought to a head at the Council of Constantinople (381) which affirmed that the Spirit was indeed of the same ‘substance and nature’ of God, but like Jesus, a separate ‘person’. While perhaps theologically acceptable, Karen Armstrong concludes in her book, “A History of God”,

“For many Western Christians . . . the Trinity is simply baffling”.

Richard Rohr agrees with Armstrong that of all the Christian statements of belief, that of the Trinity seems furthest removed from human life.

So, what secular sense can we make of this? Can the ‘secular’ sense make ‘common’ sense?

The Secular Side of the Trinity

From our secular viewpoint, when put into Teilhard’s context of universal evolution, the concept of the Trinity becomes not only much simpler but more relevant to human life. Looking through Teilhard’s (and before him, Blondel’s) eyes, we have seen how God can be reinterpreted from a supernatural being which is the ‘over and against of man’ who creates, rewards and punishes, to the ‘ground of being’, the basis for the universe’s potential for evolution via increase in complexity. And applying this perspective to Jesus, we saw last week how he can be reinterpreted from a sacrifice necessary to satisfy such a distant God, to the personification of this increase in complexity as it rises through cosmic evolution to eventually manifest itself as the human person: the ‘signpost to God’.

In the same way we can see a third facet of this ‘axis of evolution’, the ‘Spirit’, as the energy which unites the products of evolution in such a way as to effect their increase in complexity. From this perspective, the ‘Spirit’ is simply the “the agent of complexification in evolution.”

More specifically, we can begin to see how this ‘triune God’ can be seen to be ‘personal’.   The synthesized collaboration of these three principles of evolution effects what we know as the product of evolution that we refer to as ‘the person’.

Christianity puts names to these three aspects of the ground of being:

  • ‘Father’ as the underlying principle of the unfolding of the universe in general, but as the principle of this becoming as it emerges after long periods of time as the ‘person’.
  • ‘Son’ as the manifestation of the product of evolution that has become ‘person’
  • ‘Spirit’ as the energy by which this ‘becoming’ takes the form of increasing complexity which leads to the ‘person’

Or, more succinctly

  • The ‘Father’ acts to move the universe along its evolutionary path.
  • Jesus is the blueprint for this action.
  • Spirit is the agency by which such action results in increased complexity

As we have noted frequently in this blog, Teilhard describes the human manifestation of this third ‘person’, this third facet of the ground of being, as love:

“Love is the only energy capable of uniting entities in such a way that they become more distinct.”

   There’s something very revolutionary about this assertion. Before the advent of the human, universal ‘complexification’ rose through the outcome of such unification: increased complexity only occurred in the antecedent to the union, the precedents are left unchanged.

This can be seen in the early stages of universal evolution where more complex atoms result from the unification of less complex electrons and more complex molecules from less complex atoms. In the human person, the act of love increases the level of complexity in the uniters themselves. It is in this latest manifestation of the energies of the universe that we ourselves grow when we participate in love. So much more than the emotion which we experience when we unite, this unification effects our personal coming to be of what we are capable of. The point that Teilhard makes many times in his writing is that love is more ontological than it is emotional.

And in addressing this last agent of becoming, the ‘Spirit’, we can now see more clearly how John’s astounding statement begins to make secular sense:

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him.”

Thus, Teilhard locates the ’Spirit’ squarely in the axis of evolution, as the manifestation of the energy which powers evolution through its rising levels of complexity. We can see in Science’s “Standard Model’ how this energy is manifest in forces such as the atomic forces, electricity and magnetism, gravity and chemistry as they all collaborate in raising the universe from the level of pure energy to that of matter sufficiently complex to provide the building blocks of life. We can also see how this energy continues to manifest itself in raising the complexity of living matter through the process of Natural Selection. Understanding the ‘Spirit’ is simply recognizing how evolutionary products aware of their consciousness (human persons) can cooperate with this energy to be united in such a way as to advance their individual complexity (their personal growth) and therefore continue to advance the complexity of their species.

Last week we noted that Richard Rohr decried how the increasing structure and dogmatism of the Christian church increased the distance between man and God by decreasing the relevance of its message. With our secular perspective, we can see how it is possible to understand the Trinity in terms which are relevant to life.

The Next Post

This week we saw that how adding the ‘Spirit’ to the ‘Father’ and the ‘Son’ completes an understanding of the ‘the ground of being’, the basis of the universe’s ‘coming to be’ in general. More importantly, we saw how we can begin to understand how this agent of evolution which has “raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence” (Richard Dawkins) works in our individual lives, as our personal dimension of the ‘axis of evolution’.

There is still another aspect of the concept of ‘The Trinity’ to explore. Understanding that the universe ‘is raised..to complexity” by the three-vectored actions of the ‘ground of being’, Teilhard proposes a ‘model’ how they act in concert to effect such raise in complexity. Next week we will look into this model as we address the “Convergent Spiral of Evolution.

December 19, 2019 – The Secular Side of Jesus

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This Week

Last week we took a look at how the basic Western understanding of the value of the human person has developed into a hermeneutic for a secular approach to a ‘science of the person’. We saw how many seeking to apply the methods of science to the improvement of human lives have adopted many of the core values of Christianity without being shackled by its belief in the ‘supernatural’.

This week we will begin to apply our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ from November 14, 2019, to some of the subjects of religion In our search for “The Secular Side of God’. The first such subject will be the ‘person of Jesus’. From our secular perspective, who or what was Jesus?

This week’s post summarizes the posts from May 11 to July 20, 2017.

Starting with the ‘New Testament’

The obvious starting place for such inquiry is the so-called “New Testament” consisting of the four gospels and other commentaries, the most influential of which is Paul.   Nearly all, if not all, Western religions base their teachings in some way on these documents, with the ‘liturgical’ religions making use of teachings which have evolved from these documents

The actual dates of the life of Jesus are not certain, and the first person to write about him seems to be Paul, some years after Jesus’ death. All the other authors of the ‘New Testament’ seem to have come later, so it seems that no one who wrote of Jesus actually knew him but depended on stories which were prevalent in the many new churches which sprung up after his death.

The ‘basic’ set of scriptures seems to be the three ‘synoptic’ gospels, effectively ‘stories of Jesus’, written some years after Paul, which depict Jesus as a Jewish man whose teachings offered politically dangerous interpretations of the law of Moses (The Torah), and suffered the consequence of death, after which he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven. Bart Ehrman, biblical scholar, notes that the ‘miraculous’ content of these scriptures (virgin birth, resurrection, etc) are not uncommon to other such stories which appear during this time, and were probably understood by early Christians as competition.

These teachings, as found in the Synoptic Gospels, can be seen, unsurprisingly, to reflect the legacy of the Torah, and hence carried with them the same ‘dualities’ of the ‘Old’ Testament, such as

    • How is a good God compatible with evil in the world?
    • Was God a ‘loving father’ or a ‘vengeful judge’?
    • Was scripture a ‘law of God’ to be followed literally or a testament to be refined by Jesus’ teachings?

The New Testament introduced some new dualities, such as

    • Was Jesus human or in some way divine?
    • Did God kill him to avenge Adam’s ‘original sin’?

These dualities can be seen to be playing out even to this day.

The three Synoptic gospels are followed in the New Testament by a fourth, that of John, who introduces an entirely new perspective. In John, the ‘divinity’ of Jesus is emphasized, and his relationship with God is depicted as more intimate. From this perspective, John sees Jesus as a manifestation of an undercurrent of divine life in all persons, going so far as to say

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in Him”

   In this concept of “the Word made flesh”, John locates Jesus as an aspect of the same ontology in which creation itself was effected, representing the ‘blueprint’ for creation in the same way that God can be seen in the ‘act’ of creation. While Paul first understood ‘the Christ’ as Jesus’ reward for his sacrifice, John more fully understands ‘the Christ’ as an essential thread of creation, become human in the person of Jesus.

So in just a handful of years, a single lifetime, we see the Christian understanding of Jesus evolving from a teacher whose morality seemed grounded in preparation for ‘the coming’, to one who offers a sacrifice to an angry, judgmental God who has withheld his love to humans due to an ancient sin, to one rewarded (“exalted”) with divinity for his sacrifice, to one whose ‘divinity’, whose ‘oneness with God’ was a necessary thread in the creation of the universe.   At the same time, we see an evolution of the understanding of God as well, from a God whose primary characteristic was ‘judgment’ to one whose very nature was ‘love’.; and from being located ‘out there’, over against us, to a presence so intimate in us that our very nature is entwined in it.

John clearly leads to a concept of God in which we and ‘he’ are intimate, how Jesus illustrates this intimacy in a way that we can imitate, and in the act of imitation we become more aware of ‘him’. With all this, however, it’s not difficult to see how successive theological development in the West has led to the idea of a distant God requiring ‘intermediaries’ to achieve contact (Jesus, Mary, Saints). The emergence of the theory of ‘substitutionary atonement’ in the 12th century, for example, saw Jesus as a mere afterthought when God’s first plan did not work out. The ‘cognitive dissonance’ between this theory and John’s assertion of “God in us” persists in many Christian expressions to this day.

Jesus and Evolution

So how does all this play out in our secular approach to God? As we have established, our approach to making sense of things is to place them in an evolutionary context, following the approach of Teilhard de Chardin. Where does Jesus, and ‘the Christ’ fit into this?

To Teilhard, this begins with the identification of ‘complexification’ as the essential metric of evolution. Once we understand this, the rest simply requires recognition of how this increased complexity manifests itself in every evolutionary step. To Teilhard, this can be seen in the increase in consciousness which results from such increase in complexity, a metric that can be seen in all steps of evolution from the big bang to the human person. He posits an ‘axis of evolution’, a tree the sap of which is increased complexity and the fruit of which is increased consciousness.

From this perspective, complexity, and its corollary, consciousness, grows until it manifests itself in the human person as ‘consciousness become aware of itself’. This capacity is unique to the human, and distinguishes ‘the person’ from its evolutionary precedents.

Jesus, to Teilhard, is the first person to seem to have been aware of this uniqueness, as shown in his understanding of ‘love’ as the underlying energy of this agency, the importance of the person, and the potential for intimacy with the sap of the tree from which we came. Paul’s first step to understanding Jesus as ‘the Christ’, followed by John’s step of understanding ‘the Christ’ as that aspect of this sap which produces the fruit of the human person, is evidence of both the significance of Jesus’ teaching to an understanding of evolution and its agency in continuing the rise of evolution toward ever more complex manifestations.

Thomas Jefferson, in surely what was one of the most momentous ‘reinterpretations’ of traditional Christianity, (presaging Richard Dawkins’ ‘divesting traditional religious beliefs’ of their ‘baggage’) boils down the teachings of Jesus to the core assertion that ‘we are all equal’, hence human persons

“may be trusted to govern themselves without a master”

And thus forming the cornerstone for what has evolved into a highly successful society.

The Next Post

This week we began begin to apply our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to the ‘person of Jesus’, seeing how John’s insight of “The Word made flesh” identifies the person of Jesus as the earliest manifestation of a cosmic upwelling of what was to become ‘the person’.

Next week we will continue our summary of the blog into addressing ‘The Trinity’.

December 12 – Psychology as Secular Meditation

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Today’s Post

Last week we expanded Teilhard’s approach to meditation into discrete steps by which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with the ‘ground of being’ which underlays universal evolution, as moving toward a general search for the “Secular Side of God”.

We noted that such an approach might sound ‘overly religious’, and perhaps out of place in a ‘secular’ approach to this ‘ground of being’. Even though, as we noted, it requires no religious mindset, it is also true that such religious perspective, warts and all, has seeped into Western secular culture with its increasing focus on the importance of the ‘person’ as well as the idea of ‘connection’ to both ourselves and our ‘mileu’.

In this general approach of looking at this search from the secular point of view, this week we will take a look at how a form of “secular meditation” can be seen in the secular empirical practice of ‘psychology’. We’ll look at psychology from the two major approaches of Freud and the ‘Existentialists’, and compare these approaches in light of Teilhard’s context of evolution.

This segment of the summary of the blog, “The Secular Side of God” can be found in the posts from November 10, 2016 to January 5, 2017

The Emergence of Psychology

Beginning with the rising tide of humanity’s awareness of itself as ‘personal’, summarized in Karen Armstrong’s book, “The Great Transformation”, humans began to apply empirical tactics to their understanding of the world about them. This new approach to reality inevitably led to the human person itself as a subject of this enquiry.

Even the most casual study of human history, however, reveals a ‘dark side’ to humanity. All of the great books of ancient religions recognize it and warn against it.   It’s not surprising that the first approaches to making secular sense of human behavior would have focused on this ‘dark side’

One of the first thinkers to attempt a systematic empirical approach to the human ‘psyche’ was Sigmund Freud, applying the new, empirical and objective methods of science to the making and testing of hypotheses of human growth and relationships. His hermeneutic, however, was more in line with an understanding derived more from the negative interpretations of Lucretius and Hobbes than the positive approaches of Plato, Plotinus and Augustine. While Freud wove a phenomenal cloth of hypotheses about the makeup of human nature, his assumption of the danger of the core of humanity colored his entire approach. In his view, the human person was, at its core, very dangerous indeed.

Freud was the first to systematically apply the emerging practices of science to study of the human person, and assembled a magnificent edifice of concepts, terminology and theory which was applicable to diagnosis and treatment of human emotional problems. Unfortunately, his premise of the dangerous nature of the basic human, combined with his disdain of organized religion, colored this remarkable undertaking with a deep-seated pessimism that was to permeate his ‘school’ of psychology.

Freud’s view of human ontology was surely influenced by Darwin’s theory of evolution, in which the human evolved from a non-human (animal) ancestor. He held that this evolution explained the source of our ‘dark’ side, and hence had to be overcome if we were to rid ourselves of our ‘psychoses’. In his words:

“Eros and destructiveness are intertwined within all erotic relationships. Love is not at the basis of everything unless you add hate to it”.

   While Teilhard could say of the voice that flows from our most inner core

“It is I, be not afraid”

   Freud would say

“It is Ego, be very afraid”

   Freud’s negative assumption of human nature can be seen in that bastion of European Christianity, Martin Luther. Luther himself, echoing Calvin’s assessment o “total depravity”, expressed his opinion of the basic nature of the human person when he said

“Men are like piles of manure covered by Christ”.

This approach permeated many expressions of Western Christianity, and no doubt highly influenced Freud.

So Freud, while pioneering the application of the objective secularism of science to the study of the human person, nonetheless arrives at a position at odds with Teilhard’s proposition that the kernel at the core of the person is a trustworthy manifestation of the same agent of rising complexity afoot in the evolution of the universe. However, we can find agreement between Freud and Teilhard on several things, such as the existence of a personal core of energy which underlies human growth and relationships, and understanding love as manifested in the reciprocal exchange of this energy between individual persons.

Teilhard and Freud sharply disagree on the nature and source of this energy, and the role that this reciprocal exchange could have in positive growth, maturity, and even the creation of the person involved in its exchange.  The difference between these two schools of thought, one positive and one negative, sharpens further when they are applied to human relationships at te social level.

The ‘Positive’ Schools of Thought

Even though Freud correctly recognized the ‘Dark Side’, his assumption that the kernel of the person is dangerous does not take into account that it is through engagement with this kernel that the human evolves from emotional immaturity toward personal wholeness. It’s not that the child’s essence is negative, but that his growth towards maturity is incomplete.

After the Second World War, a second, decidedly non-Freudian approach to psychology began to emerge. While agreeing with Freud that it is possible to have a ‘science of the human’, it is not necessary to ‘fragmentize’ him as was done by Freud. This ‘Existential’ approach, as it came to be known, focused less on understanding behavior by reference to a predetermined Freudian structure and more on understanding how persons themselves subjectively experience reality. Psychology began to move from analysis and diagnosis to guided inner search.

Thinkers such as Rollo May, Abraham Maslow and Ashley Mongatu were among the first to focus on the development of human potential and placing humans in an evolutionary context, believing that the negative and antisocial aspects of behavior discovered by Freud were more evidence of immaturity than as proof of an unredeemable core.

A more recent example of this approach can be seen in Carl Rogers, who summarized his approach to psychology:

“How can I provide a relationship which this person may use for his own personal growth?”

   instead of,

“How can I analyze, diagnose, treat, cure, or change this person?”

   The goal of both approaches is betterment of the individual, but the methods are clearly different.

Rogers takes a view of our personal evolution that is quite different from Freud. He assumes that each human person comes into the world with a quantum of potency, and that instead of being broken, he is incomplete and capable of personal evolution –growth– towards increased being (or as Karen Armstrong would put it, “more completely possession of one’s self”).

It should be noted that Rogers’ articulation of the emerging characteristics of a maturing person are purely secular. His methods are those of science: observe, theorize, and test. They require no adherence to religious belief (and are often considered antithetical to some), but rather a basic, fundamental belief in the trustworthy nature of the basic self, and a willingness to cooperate with it.

In Rogers’ therapeutic relationship between therapist and patient, concepts such as belief, faith and love, commonly associated with religion, take on a new, secular, and much more relevant meaning.

Rogers’ approach offers a structure for a true, secular, employment of secular meditation as a means to self-discovery. 

Freud, Rogers and Teilhard in a Nutshell

Freud applies science to atheism, “It is Id, be very afraid”

Rogers applies experience to science, “It is me, I am trustworthy”

Tielhard applies science to religion. “It is I, be not afraid”

As Teilhard affirms, finding ourselves is finding the universal thread of evolution that rises in us. As Rogers discovers, the legacy that we receive as human persons can be trusted to power our growth towards more complete being. From this insight, God can not only be found but, the ‘ground of being’ can be embraced.

Teilhard and Rogers offer an approach for such a process:

After identifying God as the agent of evolution,

by which things increase in complexity over time,

through which the process of evolution is possible,

from the big bang to the human,

as products of evolution, even in our lives,

to which we can come in contact

by searching for the kernel of ourselves

using the emerging insights of science

The Twelve-Step program of Alcoholics Anonymous is another example of ‘secular meditation’. In creating this program in 1935, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, with typical American pragmatism, designed a truly practical and deliberately secular program based on the Existentialist’s premise that humans, at their core, were redeemable. Several decades of practice of this approach has established significant objective evidence that the assumptions of ‘The Twelve Steps’ program are indeed valid.

The Next Post

This week we took a look at how the basic Western understanding of the value of the human person has developed into a hermeneutic for a secular approach to a ‘science of the person’. Granted that many scientists take a reductive approach to such science, seeing the human person as the organized activity of aggregated molecules, nonetheless those seeking to apply the methods of science to the improvement of human lives have adopted many of the core values of Christianity without being shackled by its belief in the ‘supernatural’.

Next week we will begin to apply our ‘principles of reinterpretation’ to some of the subjects of religion In our search for “The Secular Side of God’. The first such subject will be the “person of Jesus’.

December 5 Secular Meditation: Finding Ourselves, Finding God, Without Religion

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This Week

Last week we made a first cut at seeing how meditation can be understood as a secular approach to finding ‘the ground of being’ in its manifestation as ‘the ground of us’. Following Blondel’s assertion that “Every statement about God is effectively a statement about man”, we can see that every step toward God is therefore a step towards ourselves

This week we will move on to summarizing the blog, “The Secular Side of God” in looking more closely at Teilhard’s secular approach to ‘meditation’.

The Secular Side of Meditation

We noted last week that the very idea of ‘meditation’ conjures much negative association with the more empirical among us- seen as a decidedly right-brained excess of emotion requiring disdain for ‘life as lived’, disconnection from social life and ultimately self-centered. Teilhard’s example from last week, however, shows how the act of meditation can be understood as a clearer look at ourselves, or as he puts it, a “clearer disclosure of God in the world”.

Teilhard’s example can be expanded into a straightforward, secular roadmap for this process:

Step 1: Recognizing the facets of our person

“I took the lamp and, leaving the zones of everyday occupations and relationships, where my identity, my perception of myself is so dependent on my profession, my roles- where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates.”

Here Teilhard explores the ‘scaffolding’ of his person: those influences which affect the development of personality: beliefs, faiths and fears. How much of who we are and what we believe have we consciously accepted, as opposed to those facades which we have constructed as a protective skin to ward off the dangers of life?

Step 2: Accepting where we are

”At each step of the descent, with the removal of layers of my identity defined from without, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me.”

What happens when we begin to recognize these facades and scaffoldings, recognizing which ones move us forward, and which hold us back, and try to imagine the consequence of divesting ourselves of them? How can we ultimately trust that which lies beneath is indeed ‘trustworthy’? Upon what can we place our faith in our capacity for the ‘dangerous actions’ that we must undertake each day?

Step 3: Acknowledging our powerlessness

“And when I had to stop my descent because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and from it flowed, arising I know not from where, the current which I dare to call my life”.

This is a difficult step for most of us. Whatever skills we have learned, tactics that we have developed and beliefs that we have forged, we have no control over the basic person we are or the energy of cosmic becoming that incessantly flows into us.

Step 4: Accepting powerlessness

“My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.” “In the last resort, the profound life, the fontal life, the new-born life, escapes our life entirely.”

 This step is even more difficult. Beneath the trepidation of the many actions required of us in our daily lives is the fear of their consequences. Will we be able to successfully deal with the consequences of our decisions without the armors of ego, self-centeredness and emotional distance? Are we even able to predict the consequences of our actions, much less survive dealing with them? Ultimately, in spite of our professions, families and friends are we not alone?

Step 5: Trusting the ground of being

“At that moment, I felt the distress characteristic to a particle adrift in the universe, the distress which makes human wills founder daily under the crushing number of living things and of stars. And if something saved me, it was hearing the voice of the Gospel, guaranteed by divine success, speaking to me from the depth of the night:

                                                     “It is I, be not afraid.”

How do we dare believe that whatever is at the source of our being, it is nonetheless on our side? How is it possible to see this ‘fontal’ life which pours into us at each moment as an individual instantiation of the general forces which have brought (and are still bringing) the universe into being? How do we dare trust that these forces, welling up over billions of years, will continue to well up in ourselves? How can we begin to recognize and more importantly cooperate with this inner source of energy so that we can be carried onto a more complete possession of ourselves?

Secular Meditation

There is nothing religious about the first four steps. The assumptions about the nature of the universe that science and biology assert, once the phenomenon of increasing complexity is added, are all that is necessary to state them. The essential Teilhard insight is that the addition of this phenomenon, while not a specific scientific theory, is not only necessary for inclusion of the human person in the scope of scientific enquiry, it is also necessary for the process of evolution itself. A universe without increasing complexity would not evolve.

Thus this line of thought, that a search for the ground of being of the universe entails an understanding of the ground of our being, while finding a stronger (if somewhat unfocussed) voice in religion, is not mute in the empirical processes of science.

An example of this voice can be seen in the similarity between these five steps and the very successful but deliberately secular “Ten Steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous. The foundational step of exploring and learning to trust one’s self is at the basis of much of Western secular thinking. Psychology itself, as we will address next week, can therefore be seen as ‘secular meditation’.

The Next Post

This week we expanded Teilhard’s approach to meditation into discrete steps by which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with the ‘ground of being’, as moving toward a general search for the “Secular Side of God”.

In this general approach of looking at this search from the secular point of view, next week we will take a look at how psychology can be seen as a form of “secular meditation”.