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’.