Secular mysticism today

Today’s Post

     Last week we continued our look at mysticism, this time looking at it from the role of ‘imagination’ in filling in the missing details that occur when we attempt to become ‘aware’ of the world outside the dark cave of our skulls.  This process can be seen as resonant with John Haught’s assertion that

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

This week we will focus Teilhard’s ‘lens’ on seeing how this plays out today

The Modern Mystic

Haught’s insight recognizes that religion and science need each other’s insights if they’re to help us make sense of things.  This simple realization is one of the pillars of modern mysticism: seeing things as a whole.

Humans have been learning to see things more holistic for centuries.  The simplest first step is to recognize that every action has a consequence.  A close second step is to recognize that all consequences cannot be foretold.  This of course is at the base of the record of human ‘trial and error’ that has taken us to where we are today.

An example of this process can be seen in the human approach to ‘fuel’, addressed in more detail in  February of 2020.  In this example, the earliest choice of fuel was wood, which quickly became a problem as society became more densely packed with the advent of cities.  Since it requires a lot of volume to produce heat, the logistics of chopping and shipping wood quickly overcame its caloric benefit.  Once it was realized that coal was much more efficient and required less logistics, it became the primary fuel but once again its ill effects on the increasing density of human population became a detriment.  This trial-and-error process has proceeded into development of many potential sources of fuel that are necessary for the continuation of human evolution, but which all bring a widening net of delivering technology as well as unwanted consequences which must be managed.

The size of the net, measured in such metrics as logistics, health hazards and cost, requires an ever-widening perspective.  Not only does the linear size of the net expand, but the necessity for understanding how consequences barely seen today can increase over time, such as the impact of lead paint on the development of cognition in children.  As the net of ills expands, it becomes necessary to widen the net of understanding the consequences.  Continual increases in the holism of the recognition of consequences are needed.
While seeing ‘mysticism’ in the pedestrian concept of learning to see things more holistically might not connote the rapt ecstasy depicted by Renaissance painters of St. Theresa of Avila, the effects are more profound.  Norberg’s nine facets of human evolution summarize the way human life can be improved and individual lives uplifted by such secular manifestations of Teilhard’s ‘psychisms’ in which human groups come to realize fundamental truths about both human needs and our capacity to meet them.

Teilhard, as a font of such an integrated view of reality, influencing Haught, Rohr and the many others we have met along the way, is an example of the ‘modern mystic’.  His highly integrated perception of the universe as a single thing in which traditional human concepts such as ‘one and many’, ‘natural and supernatural’, ‘sprit and matter’ are all knitted into a colorfully integrated fabric of reality in which the opposites addressed in each duality simply become single things with different ways to make sense of them.  It is not that the contrasts inherent in their traditional dualistic treatment disappear but are now recognized as points in a spectrum.  Blue is not the opposite of green, but simply another color that can be found in a single, integrated ray of sunlight once you employ a prism through which their particularities can be distinguished as different wavelengths of a single, multispectral beam of energy.  Using Teilhard’s ‘prism of evolution’, the long list of dualities which has mired religion in the mud of irrelevancy can be overcome, permitting it to regain its place in the human quest for the sense of things.

We have seen this insight from Teilhard before, but it becomes more relevant in the light of modern mysticism:

“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 the is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is hominized in him”

  To Teilhard, the ultimate mystical insight is the perspective that each of us participates in the universal upwelling of complexity that has infallibly risen over the span of fourteen billion years. While this might sound like a religious sentiment, Teilhard also recognizes the value of such a cosmically integrated perspective to secular science:

“To explain scientifically is to include the facts in a general coherent interpretation.”

   The degree of truth of a statement, he is saying, is directly proportional to the ‘general coherence’ which it reflects.  In such a way, the ‘evolution of truth’ can be seen as we use our mysticism to better understand what has been referred to as ‘the ineffable’.

The common ground between science and religion becomes more clearly delineated by such “secular mysticism”.  As science’s understanding of the universe unfolds, it uncovers the coherence of all things. As it does, this coherence can increase our own nondual recognition of not only our fit into the universe but the intimate relationship between the core of our being and the axis of evolution that nourishes it.

By focusing Teilhard’s lens, we have seen how the recognition of ourselves as ‘the fruit of the cosmic spark’ can result in a profound sense of our rootedness in the cosmic sweep of evolution.

Mysticism therefore isn’t a state only achieved by those who would withdraw from the teeming and throbbing mass of humans being painfully compressed as they advance across the globe.  The modern mystic, as modelled by Teilhard, is one who would recognize the single heart beating at the core of this phenomenon, the one to which we can hear our own heart resonate if we but learn to listen.  There is only one reality, and the authentic mystic seeks to discover how it manifests itself in the seeming contradictions in which it presents itself.

The Next Post

This week we have shifted our focus onto mysticism as it can be found in today’s secular world.

Next week we will address how evolution is proceeding in the human species today to identify what can be seen if we look at It through the eyes of a ‘modern mystic’.