Today’s Post

Last week we identified the need for relevancy as the driver for reinterpretation.  With that recognized, how do we go about it?  This week we will take a look at some strategies for reinterpreting long-held beliefs.

The Process of Reinterpreting

From the earliest days of human thought, man has attempted to understand the workings of his environment, to make sense of it, to put it in a context from which he could better react or relate to it, or control it to his satisfaction.  The whole of human history, from both scientific and religion viewpoints, contains a record of such activities.  Human artifacts such as legal and moral codes document our attempts (in Teilhard’s words) to “articulate the noosphere”.

This articulation always involves searching and growing, which in turn requires the readiness to replace previous, outworn concepts with ones more consistent with our constantly expanding grasp of the universe.

Robert Irwin, artist, suggests four stages in this journey:

 –  First there’s the recognition that things don’t quite work using the old insights

– That’s followed by the stripping of conventional mental artifacts, the ways that we’ve become used to in dealing with our world

  – Then there’s the finding of the ‘core’, the basis, the essence of things,

 –  And finally there’s the replacement of the discarded mental artifacts with new, more appropriate ones

With religion, according to Blondel, the stripping consists of throwing out all the mythological, superstitious, anthropomorphic and emotional statements of belief.   The resulting perspective simply sees God as the ‘core’, the “ground of being”, as that which underlies everything as it comes to be.   In Blondel’s process, this leads to new artifacts: statements which are made from the perspective which comes from our understanding that we are part of this ‘coming to be’:  we are not static, we are  ‘becoming’.

Teilhard adds to this approach by seeing the essential act of ‘becoming’ as the result of increasing complexity over time, as we discussed in the post of 30 April 2015,  Summing Up: Human Evolution – Basic Teilhard Insights.  His insight provides the single thread which ties the three eras of evolution (pre-life, life, conscious life) together, and which is the key explaining how humans ‘naturally’ emerge from it.

So, while Irwin may have been focusing on art, there is considerable universality in his vision.  His four step process reflects Teilhard’s ‘centration’ and ‘excentration’ dialogue (the essence of human maturation).  In this maturation process, we must constantly address those things which don’t work under our previously acquired worldview, strip out those perspectives, find a better vantage point, and build new constructs.  The essence of our relationships – all which require degrees of love – constantly work to effect the first step, support us in the second and third, and reward us in the fourth.

The Principles of Reinterpretation

So, if we can agree on the process, what about the guidelines?  What guidelines can we use when we go about ‘stripping our conventional artifacts’?  What principles do we employ when we take on the very difficult job of attempting an objective perspective on our inner prejudices and attitudes?  As mentioned in the last post, many of these perspectives are so fundamental as to be nearly instinctual.  We didn’t develop them consciously: they came with the subconscious acceptance of the beliefs and practices of parents, teachers and society in general during our formative years.

The first step, therefore, is to follow thinkers like Blondel along this arduous path.

Blondel notes that all of us are to some extent already on this path.  The simple realization that we must constantly attempt to see others objectively and to transcend our ego and self- centeredness if we are to have deep relationships with them, is a first step along this path.  This need for overcoming ego is a basic tenet for nearly every human religion.  It is, by necessity, a ‘principle of reinterpretation’.

Therefore, when we set out along the road to reinterpreting our traditional beliefs, we must be armed with such principles.  As we will see in this last segment of the blog, application of these principles to the many, often contradicting, statements of Western religion will permit us to recognize the ‘core’ that Robert Irwin identifies, and uncover their relevance to our lives.

The Next Post

This week we have addressed the process of reinterpretation and identified the need for guidelines, ‘principles’ which can be applied as we search traditional statements of religion for their ‘cores’.  Next week we will offer a set of such principles, as extracted from our first three segments.