Bolstering our mystical imagination with empirical findings

Today’s Post

     Last week we suggested that mysticism is alive and well, not only in the secular sense, but in the modern sense as well.

This week, we will look into what it is that these modern mystics are seeing that adds a ‘liminal’ characteristic to our empirical findings as we begin to ‘make sense of things’.

‘Zero Sum’ vs ‘Win Win’

We have previously seen how Johan Norberg identified nine facets of human evolution documented in examples of increases in human welfare that show them all to increase by an unprecedented explosion over just the most recent hundred fifty years.  In his book, “Open”, he goes on to address how such undeniable data contradicts the prevalent but dystopian concept of ‘zero sum’.

To many, the idea of ‘zero sum’ underlays the popular belief that any gain is necessarily countered by a comparable loss.  Norberg sees such a belief as essential to a prevalent current political belief that one side must necessarily triumph over the other side in any disagreement.  The viewpoint of ‘zero sum’ as opposed to ‘win-win’ can be found in nearly all expressions of religion, alongside that which sees life as a ‘rise’ in some places and a ‘stalemate’ in others.

Norberg makes the case that if life were a ‘zero sum’ game, it would not progress.  Any increase in welfare encountered in human life would be paid for by degradation encountered elsewhere.  Nowhere is this perspective more prevalent than in the distribution of wealth.  In his book, “Progress”, he takes aim at the conventional wisdom that increases in wealth on the part of the few is paid for by increases in poverty on the part of the many.  From such a dystopian perspective, “wealth is accumulated off the backs of the poor.”  The total wealth of the world, by this reckoning, is static, effectively ‘zero sum’.  In a Malthusian conclusion, human evolution eventually requires all the wealth to be owned by a few, collapsing society and leading to human extinction.

Norberg’s data, however, shows quite a different trend, and leads to a contrary conclusion.  The data not only shows world wealth increasing exponentially, but it also shows poverty to decrease at the same rate.  Effectively, by this reckoning, total global wealth is increasing.  ‘Win-win’ isn’t the exception: if you know where and how to look at history it’s the norm.

Norberg asks the question in his book, “Open”, where does this global trend come from?  In a mechanistic universe, in which energy is neither created nor destroyed, the rule of ‘zero sum’ would seem to dominate.  , one which is deeperTeilhard poses an insight into the same phenomenon: in all relationships, not only does “true union differentiate”, it leads to increased fullness.  As in the case of the nine metrics of human evolution in which Norberg charts, how does the increased ‘fullness’, now quantified in the increase in human welfare, occur?

The ‘cosmic spark’, postulated by the sages of the Axial Age, articulated so clearly by Teilhard, and addressed by the nascent science approach to ‘information’ is clearly at work in Norberg’s nine metrics.  Repeating John Haught’s insight:

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ has been part of the universe from the start.”

   This of course simply reflects Teilhard’s insight that the energy of evolution by which the universe rises to increased levels of energy (and hence ‘consciousness’) necessarily continues in the human product.  Recognition of this ‘cosmic spark’ has been the goal of nearly all religious enterprises and is echoed in every mystic’s quest.  As Norberg’s insight shows, traces of it can be seen be seen in the most mundane facts if we but choose to cast our nets of understanding widely enough.

Evolutionary Mysticism

Insights such as this, a small example in a much larger group of perspectives of human existence, are illustrations of how a trained eye can be paired with a comprehensive set of facts to result in a much clearer perception of not only of our environment, but much more importantly, the part we play in it.  This offers a ‘secular’ definition of mysticism.  When put into an evolutionary perspective, our understanding of ourselves and our milieu can come together into a comprehensive worldview that makes it possible for us to navigate our own personal evolution in a way that insures our collective survival.  The ‘evolutionary mystic’ is simply one who learns how use the insights of imagination to integrate the data available to us into a coherent context in which our own lives are resonant.  Teilhard sees cosmic evolution in this way when he says

“Evolution is the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes in a universe in which there is always more to see”

   While this perception of mysticism might be seen as distinctly contrary to the mystical experiences of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, with their emphasis on emotional ecstasy and separateness from society, the common ground is there: seeing.

One concept that Teilhard identifies as essential to human evolution is the ‘psychism’, by which humans pool their insights in such a way that a new insight is born, one which is deeper and more comprehensive than that of any individual.  In summary the psychism is simply a group of humans who collectively undertake a quest.  It can be a group of carpenters building a house, or a group of scientists discovering the treatment of a virus.  To varying degrees, such undertakings result in a satisfaction in what is accomplished, but whose progress is guided by a vision of the unfinished product and the need for depending on each other to achieve it.  The more difficult the job, the more necessary will be the triad of confidence, vision and relationship (Paul’s faith, hope and love) that is active in the group’s work.

The holistic vision which sees the whole emerging from seemingly disjoint parts is just as alive in the psychism as it is in the desert mystic with her ecstatic emotions.  It is perhaps more profound in the psychism because it is a celebration of the fruit of human relations instead of requiring the recoil from them.

Put into the sweep of cosmic evolution, evolutionary mysticism can be seen in instances of ‘empirical mysticism’.  Teilhard’s “intuition bursting on a pile of facts” is described by secular thinkers such as Albert Einstein in terms of ‘joyful awakening’ to a clearer vision of universal cohesiveness.

The larger psychism, consisting in the groups of scientists which developed the molecular concept of genetic activity by which a treatment of the Covid-19 virus emerged, all report the same reaction to uncovering how the Covid virus attacked the human gene.

The Next Post

This week we explored the idea of increased ‘holism’ in the human attempt to more fully grasp and understand the objective reality that we reflect in our subjective minds.

Next week we will take a closer look at such a seemingly dualistic idea as ‘empirical mysticism’.

 

 

     What part does mysticism play in developing our sense of what’s real? 

Today’s Post

   Last week we moved into the terrain of ‘mysticism’, seeing it from the perspective of religion but recognizing its presence in the human ability to gain better understanding of the reality in which we live.

This week, we’ll look more closely at the part that ‘secular mysticism’ plays in this process.

Human ‘Sense Making’

As we have suggested several times, Science and Religion are simply two of humanity’s principal ways of making sense of what we see around us so that we can become more adept at dealing with it.  Evidently, humans require confidence in the way they live their lives in order to be able to survive, and for millennia they derived this confidence from the belief that somehow reality was intelligible and somehow they could come to understand it well enough to thrive in it.  As humans became more proficient in the process of supplementing this intuitive approach to reality with physical and intellectual tools that increasingly became more empirical, the concepts and beliefs of the past could begin to become objectively understood, and hence more rooted in the objective nature of the reality which surrounded them.

The process of perfecting the mind’s grasp of what the eyes see is a perennial subject for philosophy, Science and Religion.  All three recognize that no matter how ‘correctly’ we grasp reality, there is always a facet of objective reality that is still beyond our gaze.  We cannot escape the reality that our brains are locked securely within the ‘pitch black bony vault’ of our skulls, dependent on a long trail of sensory and neurological processes before conscious awareness can begin.  And such awareness is simply the first step in an even less understood process involving such things as memory of prior experiences, emotional states and objective knowledge gained from our learning experiences.

The myriad and labyrinthine nature of this path from objective reality through sensory processes through mental gymnastics to truth as a more correct repackaging of reality in our brains has led many to suggest that whatever we think we know, we don’t.  This suggestion resembles that of Richard Feynman, ‘the father of quantum theory’, when he asserts that “Those who claim to understand quantum theory, don’t”.  While such dystopian perspectives are not without their nuggets of truth, the more realistic conclusion, based on the human’s success in evolution thus far, is that good enough can suffice as today’s step to tomorrow’s better.

Imagination and The Flow of Awareness

Consider for a moment what happens when we go through the process of ‘seeing’.  The electromagnetic energy that enters our eyes through the lens is projected onto the retina in the form of a multispectral waveform.  This energy is transmitted along the optic nerve to the receptor neurons in the brain.  Somehow, by a process not clearly understood, the neurons in the brain precipitate this signal into distinct images (or concepts of images) which correspond to what our brains have been taught about images of the real world.

If all this is true, and understanding the pathways from objective reality to grasping the truth about it is the key to ‘making sense of things’, where does mysticism come in?  A clue to the answer is in the concept of ‘imagination’.

It is common to contrast ‘imagining’ and ‘seeing’, as if they refer to two completely different mental processes.  In contrast to this simplistic duality, modern science is finding that the flow of awareness from that outside the eye to that finally grasped by the mind is quite complex.  Anil Seth, neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, puts it this way:

“Perceptions come from the inside out just as much, if not more, than from the outside in.”

   From this point of view, we can begin to understand how objective reality is represented in our consciousness as subjective reality.  To some extent, we create our own reality.  At the extreme end of the spectrum, our subjective reality is understood to be so completely disconnected from objective reality that we cease to be able to function normally in society.  For most of us, a cause of such a disconnect can simply can be seen in our biases.

However, Seth’s perspective also addresses a positive characteristic of human psychophysiology: humans are capable of filling gaps in their understanding of reality.  Most of us come to realize that no situation that we face can be completely understood before we are forced to deal with it.  As a result, all our actions are subject to some level of unexpected consequences, requiring us to make choices in the face of gaps in our understanding of the situation.
We fill in those gaps with our imagination.  While this ‘imagining process’ is influenced by memory, emotion and accumulated knowledge, it still addresses the ‘unknown’ which lurks in the future as well as providing us an ability to successfully deal with it.

Human history can also be seen in the light of such gaps and our attempts to fill them.  Johan Norberg, in his book, “Open”, charts the rise and fall of successive civilizations in terms of their ability to develop answers to the questions raised by such gaps as ‘how much freedom should the individual have in society and how much should the society have?”  In his book, “Progress”, he charts the exponential rise of global welfare as successive waves of society have become more proficient at answering them by ‘imagining’ ways to frame them and inventing social structures to better manage them.

Thus, at both our personal level and at the level of cultural evolution, our ability to ‘imagine’ that which is missing from our attempt to capture reality in our minds is a factor in our dealing with this reality.  If our actions are based on ‘what we know’, this knowledge is always enhanced by what we can imagine.

This is where ‘secular mysticism’ comes in.  In true human growth to maturity, our experiences lead us to a more comprehensive and thus more successful relationship with reality, and our ability to successfully use imagination to fill the gaps in our understanding increases as well.  Most of us realize the necessary incompleteness of our knowledge as we evolve in a world which is also evolving, but as we mature we can become more confident in the mystical sense which finds a faithful unity underlying an oft-chaotic diversity.

‘Secular mysticism’ therefore is nothing more than our efforts to ‘fill the gaps’ between what we know we know and what we know that we do not know.  Humans have been aware of this ‘ineffable’ quality of reality for centuries, and musicians and poets are adept at leading us to it.  Whether tears come to our eyes when we listen to Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ or tap our toes to Brubeck’s dizzying ‘Time Out’, we are responding to this awareness of the ineffable weave of the real.

The Next Post

This week we took a deeper look at the slippery topic of mysticism, understanding that it, in the form of imagination is a natural part of increasing our sense of understanding what’s real.

Next week we will carry these secular insights into this perspective on human ‘knowing’ into seeing how they play out today.

September 9, 2021 –  Secular Mysticism

   The Mystical Approach to Making Secular Sense of Things

Today’s Post

     Last week we took a final look at the many facets of orienting our lives towards in a way which makes us more open to Teilhard’s ‘winds of life’ so that we may be ‘carried by a current’ to the fuller being which is possible to us as products of a ‘complexifying evolution’.
This week we will begin a look at yet another facet found in nearly every expression of religion, that of ‘mysticism’.

What is Mysticism?

Nearly every form of religion includes the highly subjective practice of ‘mysticism’. Traditionally, it is thought of as a communication between the natural and supernatural, often enhanced by prescribed rituals, and occasionally by psychedelic herbs.  Whatever underlies the experience, it is often profound, and felt by the mystic to open the door to a deeper, more inclusive insight into reality.  It is less insight into reality and more a deeper experience of it

It is also deeply subjective.  What the mystic ‘sees’ is highly colored by personal biases and predispositions, all of which require ‘interpretations’ to establish ‘meanings’.

The mystical experience has often been mistrusted by the established order of religious hierarchy, seen as potentially threatening to the orthodoxy and structure since most mystics saw their experience as a direct connection to the divine and therefore in no need for ecclesiastical mediation.  In the West, this dichotomy is evident in the distinction between monastic orders and diocesan priests.

In either case, the mystical experience itself is real, and evident in all forms of belief.  As in other concepts woven into religious belief, it can be viewed in our perspective of the ‘Secular Side of God’.

If it indeed is a way to understand reality in a way that is more complete, one which sees ‘the whole’ in place of ‘the components of the whole’, it is a valuable tactic for a clearer understanding of ourselves and our ‘fit’ into this reality.

The Incarnational Nature of Liminal Space

Liminal space is the realm of the half-imagined margin between sleep and wake, in which our minds are unfettered, allowed to roam uncaged by the spreadsheet-like structures that we erect in our pursuit of a systematic grasp of reality as we seek meaning in our lives.  This is the space prized by the historical mystics that have accompanied the structure-bound journey of orthodox religious thought in our quest for God.

In our own personal journeys, liminal space is that in which our insights can rise to light the darkness of unconsciousness, one in which the first stirrings of such recognitions as we have explored:

We are equal

Matter and spirit are bound by an implicit energy which grows over time

To become more I must love more

Fuller being always results from closer union which leads to fuller being

My failures do not define me

I can trust myself

Beneath and beyond what I see there is always more

The future can be better than the past

And, eventually the greatest insight

“It is I, be not afraid”

The navigation of liminal space can be seen in the endless attempt by artists to solidify the flicker of insight seen in this milieu, to extend a line from the firm shore of the left brain to the translucent swirl of half seen patterns of the right; from the elusive, transient ephemeral flash to the eternal solid written word or play of colors upon a canvas, from imagination to articulation.  As Tennessee Williams succinctly put it

“The object of art is to make eternal the desperately fleeting moment.”

   “The word was made flesh, and dwelt among us”.  This famous line from John could be rephrased as “the word becomes flesh and dwells within us”.  As we have seen, the term “word” is understood by Teilhard as the cosmic spark by which matter gathers ‘spirituality’ (as he defines the term) as it rises from the simplest of granules to the highly complex configuration found in the human brain.  This cosmic spark can be seen as active in our lives, that which lightens the cavernous pathways upon which we trod as we explore this liminal space within us, giving us confidence that what will be found is truly fuller being and can be trusted to lead us into greater possession of ourselves.

This is ‘incarnational’ because the ‘word’ is indeed not only the blueprint for our being but the light by which the search for what is ‘incarnate’ in us is directed.

As Jung sees it, the subconscious mind borders on the conscious mind in this liminal space.  It is Tennyson’s predawn lit by the ‘casement slowly growing a glimmering square’, filled with the ‘pipe of half awakened birds’, or the ‘teeming brain’ calling for Keats to ‘glean’.

The Secular Side of Mysticism

Christianity traditionally sees the roots of mysticism in the explosion of asceticism and monasticism that accompanied Christianity’s new legal status in the third century, one which led to the many “Desert Fathers and Mothers”.

Karen Armstrong, in her book, “The Great Transformation”, sees the roots of mysticism arising much earlier in the ‘Axial Age’ as the locus on God began to change from an exterior to an interior perspective.  During this critical period, thinkers were beginning to use their own lives and their own intuitions as reference points for their insights on human life.  As she saw it

“For the first time, human beings were systematically making themselves aware of the deeper layers of human consciousness.  By disciplined introspection, the sages of the Axial Age were awakening to the vast reaches of selfhood that lay beneath the surface of their minds.  They were becoming fully “self-conscious.”

An intimate awareness of this ‘liminal space’ was beginning to be recognized as an authentic source of insight.

The Christian mystics tapped into the new hermeneutics introduced by Christianity to expand these insights.  As Richard Rohr puts it

“The 12th century Rhineland mystic Hildegard of Bingen, and later Francis of Assisi (1182-1226) and his early followers, brought back what I call “incarnational mysticism”—finding God through things instead of ideas, doctrines, and church services, which still persists as the mainline orthodoxy down to our time.”

  Rohr cites Charles Péguy (1873–1914), French poet and essayist, as he wrote with great insight that

 “…everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.”

   Rohr articulates this journey as he notes that

“Everything new and creative in this world puts together things that don’t look like they go together at all but always have been connected at a deeper level.”

   Thus, to him mysticism seeks that deeper level, to a unified mode of nondual thinking where contradiction and paradox can be held in tension by the right brain until the left brain can begin to see the connections between them.  In this event, as Teilhard puts it

“Intuition bursts on a pile of accumulated facts.”

   Rohr notes that such activity is pervasive in Christian history.

“Just as Augustine reinterpreted Christianity in light of Plato in the 4th century, and Aquinas integrated Aristotle in the 13th, today there are dozens of theologians across the spectrum re-envisioning the Christian faith. Whose ideas are they integrating now? Darwin, Einstein, Hubble, Wilson and all those who have corrected, and continually contribute to, an evidence-based understanding of biological, cosmic, and cultural evolution.”

   This ‘evidence-based understanding’ is the secular product of the left brain’s integration of the right-brain’s intuition.  It is another example of the ‘principles of reinterpretation’ that we saw earlier, and reflects the insight of John Haught that

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

The Next Post

This week we saw how mysticism, as a facet of religion, seeks a deeper view of reality in which our understanding of it is less important than our experiencing of it.

Next week we will continue this focus on mysticism, looking at how such an approach to understanding and participating in reality can be seen today.

 

Living a life more open to the forces of evolution which can bring us to ‘fuller being’

 Today’s Post

     Continuing our look at how our response to Teilhard’s ‘winds of life’ can carry us ‘to the open sea’, we have seen the ways that the thread of universal evolution rises in us both as a species and as individual human persons that together can move us forward in ways that we are led, as Karen Alexander pus it, “into a deeper possession of ourselves”.

This week we will look a little deeper into this dual aspect of human evolution as it moves us forward.

The Progression of Human Evolution

We have attached a great deal of significance to Johan Norberg’s documentation of the exponential rise in human welfare over the last 150 years.  As we pointed out, Norberg’s plethora of statistics clearly shows a global trend which documents a rise in the general state of humanity.   This rise goes against the popular perspective that the state of humanity is deteriorating.  But, even the atheistic scientist, Richard Dawkins, agrees that something is nonetheless stirring in human evolution in his book, “The Selfish Gene” when he contrasts this facet of human evolution to Darwinistic genetic change.

“I think that a new kind of replicator has recently emerged on this very planet.  It is still in its infancy, drifting around in its primordial soup, but is already achieving evolutionary change at a rate that leaves the old gene panting far behind.  The new soup is the soup of human culture”, and this new replicator “conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission”.

Dawkins’ insight that human evolution continues faster by way of ‘memes’ (units of cultural replication) than in genes (units of biological evolution) correlates well with both Teilhard and Norberg.  All three recognize the ‘something new’ that is happening with humans that suggests an undercurrent to biological Natural Selection, which requires genetic changes to produce new species.

As we have seen many times, but particularly emphasized by Teilhard, this ‘undercurrent’ isn’t something that comes into play with the human species.  As John Haught succinctly puts it

“Running silently through the heart of matter, a series of events that would flower into ‘subjectivity’ (the ‘person’) 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.”

   And, as we have seen, finding and cooperating with this undercurrent as it is active in individual human life is an essential step towards reaping the existential reward of ‘fuller being’ that is granted to us as a ‘fruit of evolution’.  But while it might be possible to take this step, in what form does it present itself?

Taking the Steps Toward Personal Evolution 

We have seen many examples of how both scientists and theologians, as well as atheists and theists can objectively recognize in nature today what was seen only a few hundred years ago as ‘supernatural’.  Understood in this way, The ‘reward’ was granted as an action of an extrinsic and supernatural god, prompted by piety, and only fully realized after death.  The dimensions of ‘correct’ piety were defined in the tenets of organized and dogmatic religion.

We have also seen how such a thread of belief was paralleled by the continuation of the more intrinsic concepts of God, such as found in Paul and John, and kept alive by the ‘Desert Fathers and Mothers’ of the early Church.

Elaine Pagels suggests a third strand, closely related to the second but decidedly seen by the hierarchical church as heretical, one which shows up in what are called the ‘Gnostic Gospels’.  In such writings as “The Gospel of Thomas”, she finds resonance with the concept of secular meditation that we addressed earlier.

“(The Kingdom of god) is a state of being that we may enter when we come to know who we are and come to know God as the source of our being.”

   This ‘state of being’ is the same ‘interior side’ as described by Haught above and seen as the object of discovery of the process of mediation.

Thus, the awareness of its existence, and the importance of coming to recognize its agency in each of us is a necessary prerequisite to our full immersal into the flow of life as it carries us to ‘fuller being’.

As we have seen, Teilhard addresses how the human species can continue its evolution by

“…continually find(ing) 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.”

We also saw how Norberg showed concrete examples of how the three legs of the table of increased human welfare are related in this succinct statement:

• The rise of interiority reflected in the importance of the individual person in legal codes
• The rise in liberty reflected in assertions of equality and individual freedoms which enable innovation and invention
• The necessity of fruitful and productive human relationships which multiply the products of such innovation and invention

Teilhard’s succinct description of steps towards continuation of human evolution can be seen to be mirrored in individual life.

• ‘Finding new ways of arranging our lives’ requires a constant re-evaluation of our lives with a view to how we can reorient our perspectives, become less subjective, recognize and overcome our biases and other of the many practices suggested by the vast body of spiritual thinkers.
• “Most economical energy and space” refers to the ‘spiritual energy’ that we expend. How much of our time is spent in concerns about things we cannot control instead of exploring ways that it can be focused on a ‘clearer disclosure of God in the world’?
• “Increasing our interiority and liberty” by searching into ourselves more deeply on the one hand, while expanding our ‘field of view’ of the world around us on the other. This is closely mirrored by Teilhard’s dyad of “centration and excentration” in which every increase in our grasp of reality contributes to a deepening of our fullness, which in turn enables us to see things more clearly.
• “More harmonious relationships” occur when we apply this dyad of ‘centration and excentration’ to our individual relationships. In Teilhard’s insight into our relationships, the energy of evolution that incessantly causes ‘the stuff of the universe’ to unite in such a way that more complex products emerge is active in the human in the phenomenon of ‘love’.  While this phenomenon obviously powers the advance of the human species, its activity in the human person effects the personal ‘complexification’ required to move it forward.  In his succinct statement, he understands ‘fuller being’ to emerge from ‘closer union’, which itself is facilitated by ‘fuller being’.

The Next Post

This week we have addressed how our evolution as a species is dependent on our evolution as individual persons.  While Teilhard and others clarify steps toward the ‘fuller being’ that is possible to us, increasing our understanding of ourselves and the reality in which we are enmeshed can be difficult.  It calls for us to be able to see beyond the obvious, the everyday stuff of life, and our own limitations of habit, bias and often, fear.

Next week we will begin to take a secular look at the “state of being that we may enter when we come to know who we are and come to know God as the source of our being” as suggested by ‘The Gospel of Thomas”