December 16, 2021 –  Mysticism as Active in Human Evolution

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   How can mysticism be seen as a key ingredient of human evolution?

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at mysticism as a skill required to move into the future.  This week we look at the part such a skill plays in human evolution.

The Mystical Role in Human Evolution

We have addressed mysticism as a skill which is required to move into the future.  It is a key evolutionary skill, without which human evolution would simply be replaced by an endless repetition of replication followed by decay.  (Indeed, as we have seen, many materialists consider this to be exactly what is happening.)

If we can agree that coming to recognize that whatever perception that we have of reality falls short of whatever is ‘real’, one of the challenges of life is pursuing a bridge to close this gap.  Human history is filled with examples of both failing to do so and of those where success has led on to a clearer understanding of life and our part in it.   The many historical attempts to solve the enigma of the ‘one and the many’, manifested in the cacophony of governmental experiments which attempted to tame human self-centered tendencies while reaping the harvest of human capabilities for collaborative labor, speak volumes of attempts to develop the skill of building this bridge.

Richard Rohr addresses the role of mysticism in developing this skill.

 “Charles Péguy (1873–1914), French poet and essayist, wrote with great insight that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” 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. Spirituality’s goal is to get people to that deeper level, to the unified field of nondual thinking, where God alone can hold contradictions and paradox.”

   This journey from mysticism to politics frames the path of human evolution.

Teilhard offers another perspective on this path.

“Truth has only to appear once, in a single human being, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting the whole world ablaze”

   Teilhard’s understanding of the slippery term, ‘truth’ is very simple.  As he sees it, it is simply that understanding of reality which is most consistent with the reality itself.  The more the gap between our inner grasp of reality and the reality itself is narrowed, the more confidence we can have in our understanding of it.

We have referred frequently to the statistics assembled by Johan Norberg in the quantification of our human evolution in terms of human welfare.  In Chapter Four, this data was summarized in the nine categories of

Food                                                      Sanitation

Life Expectancy                                 Poverty

Violence                                              The Environment

Literacy                                                Freedom

Equality

In his identification of objective historical data which shows how human welfare has increased in each of these categories, we can see aspects of the mystical basis of our journey to the future in play.

In each of the nine cases, for the specific advances which he documents, an individual or group of individuals must first become aware of some specific phenomenon, wonder as to its causality, try to replicate it, and eventually be able to reliably cause it to happen.  The first two steps are intuitive in nature, then transferring to the empirical state in the last two.  The first two begin with a single person, or with a small ‘psychism’, and as the movement to the second two occur the ‘reach’ of the idea extends.  As we saw from Péguy above, “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.”  Paraphrasing this in our terms: “Every idea begins with an intuition about reality which becomes articulated into the standards by which we govern ourselves.”

In the case of a tenth category, that of ‘fuel’, this can be clearly seen.  The phenomenon of ‘fire’ was experienced long before it could be caused.  The ability to control heat, of course, had obvious value to human welfare, and as Teilhard notes, the ‘truth’ of this value spread inexorably among early humans.  The next steps continued the spiral of development between awareness and articulation, as the need for greater thermal efficiency grew along with the need for surviving the inevitable downsides of each new articulation.  The deforestation related to wood burning was replaced by the asphyxiation of coal burning, then by the atmospheric damages from gas:  all resulting in ever more efficient fuel offset by new ecological risks.  Each step requiring new insights into our reality followed by new articulations of these insights and new effects on human evolution requiring new insights.

Thus, the ‘mystical skill’ of humans can be seen as the essential aspect of our spiral path to the future as it is followed from our intuitional peering into liminal space through our conscious articulation into ‘ideas’ and finally emerging as the set of social norms encoded into our cultural practices.  This winding path is the social counterpoint to Teilhard’s understanding of cosmic evolution: “fuller being from closer union and closer union from fuller being”.

Next Week

This week we ended our series addressing human mysticism from a secular perspective.

A key theme in this blog has been the seeing of reality, both of ourselves and the environment we inhabit, through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’.  In doing so, we have seen how such a seemingly secular perspective can open traditional Western religious beliefs to a new and deeper bearing on human life, one which is not only more relevant to it but more intimate with the source of life which underlies our being.   Next week we will begin a series which looks into three facets of his idea of ‘evolution’ to explore how such a perspective can offer this insight.

 

December 9, 2021 –  The Enstatic Mysticism of Teilhard

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How is mysticism a key to the continuation of human evolution?

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Last week we continued our look into Cynthis Bourgeault’s insights into ‘enstasy’, and saw examples of it in scripture and in the works of Elaine Pagels.  This week we will look into how mysticism can be seen in both our ‘personization’ and in the continued flow of human evolution.

The Mystical Role in Personization

We have seen how Teilhard understands the progress of universal evolution as captured in the process of ‘complexification’.  He further sees this process leading to the emergence of ‘personization’ as he sees the ‘reflexive consciousness’ of the human as the point of greatest complexity reached thus far.  To Teilhard, not only does ‘true union differentiate’, and ‘fuller being result from closer union while closer union results from fuller being’, but that in these recursive dances the continuous rise of complexity takes on the unique aspect of ‘personness’.  What role can mysticism be seen to play in this unfolding?

As we have seen frequently thus far, Teilhard exemplified the enstatic mode, continuously weaving the profound insights of Christianity into a common cloth with the profound insights of Science.  As we saw above, Cynthia Bourgeault, who introduced the concept of enstacy to our conversation, showed how Teilhard’s insights into the evolutionary foundation of the human person led to his insights on the uniqueness of the person.  She also noted the potential danger of the other face of the ‘liminal space’.

“Teilhard’s evolutionary vision is profoundly enstatic.  He fought ecstasy all his life- the siren call, as he took it, of the Asian traditions to dissolve into the One, to fund union at the point of undifferentiated simplicity.”

She notes elsewhere that ecstasy and enstacy are not necessarily opposites but work differently in the human person.  In the traditional treatment of ecstasy, the person is pulled away from Teilhard’s psychism in order to come into contact with what is most real within us.  In the great stories of Christian mysticism, the mystic’s first step is to pull away from the trappings of society.  Some see this happening in the early days of the church as the ‘Desert Mothers and Fathers’ sought to escape the hierarchical church’s need for orthodoxy.  But no matter what the cause, the mystical life was a clear ‘siren call’ from the depths of the soul.

Teilhard’s concept of the psychism, on the other hand, recognizes that we can be called into fuller being as we undergo closer union.  Teilhard, reflected in Bourgeault’s development, notes that both enstasy and ecstasy require a ‘peering into liminal space’ for the vision that can move us to fuller being, but it is only the translation of the inner sight into fuller articulation that causes this to happen.

It should be noted that the great mystics often return from their ecstatic visions with such articulations.  For example, we saw above Hildegard’s understanding that her visions were instances of a natural human capability of ‘resonance’ with the divine.

When we explore this resonance, we are peering into the liminal space between what we know and what is real, by seeking what is still left to be understood.  To the extent that we understand, we activate our potential not only to understand more fully, but to become fuller ourselves.  Such mysticism is not only an aspect of the potential by which we become more fully what we can be, but by which the evolution of our species becomes more fully resonant with its environment.

Not only are the things we see in liminal space yet to be understood, they are potentials yet to be actualized.  Thus, when we look into liminal space, it can be said that we are looking into the future.

As we have explored it here, mysticism is simply a skill which is, as Audre Lorde put it in her poem “The Unsayable’

“…the way we give names to the nameless so it can be thought.”

Giving the ‘nameless’ a name so that it can be thought is bringing an intuition into the empirical state in which it can be objectively considered.  An insight into the future thus becomes a tangible way of preparing for it.   Seen from the perspective that we have been developing, mysticism can be seen as the building of planks to be installed on the bridge that we are building to the future.

Next Week

This week we began to address mysticism as a skill which is required to move into the future.  It is a key evolutionary skill, without which human evolution would simply be replaced by an endless repetition of replication followed by decay.  (Indeed, as we have seen, many materialists consider this to be exactly what is happening.)

Next week we will take yet another look at human history to see how it shows the slow increase in the ‘skill of mysticism’ at work in the building of our bridge to the future.

November 25, 2021 –  The ‘Enstatic’ Mode of Mysticism

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How can mysticism move beyond the ecstatic experience?

Today’s Post

We have been exploring the traditional practice of mysticism from several different perspectives, seeing it as a natural mode of human consciousness.  This week we will look at it as the empirical partner to the intuitional experience of ecstasy

Mysticism and The Duopoly of Things

Teilhard and Rohr continuously help us to better understand both reality and our place in it.  For example, we have seen many times how Teilhard addresses the recursive currents that can be seen to flow in evolution, in which we experience such things as

  • Closer union from fuller being and fuller being from closer union.
  • Increasing differentiation from closer union and the closer union that results from differentiation
  • Becoming more centered as we seek to decenter ourselves
  • How our personal growth is necessary to that of the noosphere, which in turn enriches our person
  • How intuition leads to the empiricism which can reinforce and enhance the intuitional

All of these insights demonstrate the integrated nature of human reality which reveals itself when placed into Teilhard’s ‘context of evolution’.  Such ‘dualities’ as those that flow from the traditional treatment of ‘the one and the many’ or ‘the spiritual and the material’ come into reconciliation when we understand them as cooperative energies that work together in human life to effect the ‘fuller being’ that Teilhard explores in them.

The example of understanding human consciousness as manifesting itself in the forms of intuition and empiricism, adds a duopoly of mysticism to these examples.

Cynthia Bourgeault, a modern-day mystic, Episcopal priest and author, suggests this duopoly in a recent article in the ‘Teilhard Studies’ journal.  The article is entitled “God is a Person” and focusses on Teilhard’s rationale for understanding the ‘person-ness’ of God as opposed to the impersonal ‘cosmic whole’ suggested by many Eastern religions.

As part of this examination, she references what she calls the ‘enstatic’ mode of consciousness as compared to the ‘ecstatic’ mode which is most commonly associated with the idea of mysticism.  She echoes Teilhard as she considers this mode to be

“.. a uniquely Western and Christian way of understanding what would nowadays be called the highest states of conscious realization”.

   In the ecstatic mode of mysticism, the mystic is said to be ‘carried away’ by the overwhelming sense of the divine in her life.  This intensifying and diaphanous experience is common to both Eastern and Western experiences.  However, Bourgeault sees a trend in contemporary Western thinking about mysticism that is ‘quasi-Buddhist’, and therefore reflects an understanding of the human person which is orthogonal to that of Teilhard.

In this Eastern-influenced trend, the concept of ‘person’ is, as Bourgeault puts it

“.. assigned to a more immature level of human development, definitely NOT carried forward into the higher evolutionary stages.”

      She sees this as part of an Eastern perspective of human evolution in which we are carried from a ‘more personal’ to ‘less personal ’state as we mature, and in which

“.. the personal drops out in favor of an impersonal or at best transpersonal universe.”

      This of course is quite orthogonal to Teilhard’s fundamental assumptions that

  • the universe itself evolves to a higher degree of complexity over long periods of time
  • that this higher degree of complexity manifests itself in increased consciousness
  • that increased consciousness evolves into a consciousness aware of itself
  • and that this level of ‘reflexive consciousness’ is the basis of ‘the person’

From the ‘quasi-Buddhist’ perspective, all human problems can be traced to an overemphasis of the ‘person’, and therefore can be overcome by a ‘de-personalizing’ process.  From this perspective, the ‘person’ is less a natural product of universal evolution than it is a failure of it.

In our look at the Evolutionary Ground of Happiness, we saw how Harari Yuval agreed with this dystopian take on human evolution.  Certainly, there is a parallel dystopian stream of belief in Christianity that, as Luther put it, humans are

 “.. piles of manure covered by Christ”

   We saw how there is one as well in the evolution of psychology that considers whatever it is that is at the base of human consciousness, it is ‘dangerous’.

With all this, the trend towards the ‘solitude’ of traditional mystics seems justified.  Teilhard’s insight that the most valid venue of human personal development comes in the venue of ‘relationship’ initially seems contrary to such a perspective.

Thus, we can add Bourgeault’s insight of an ‘enstatic’ mode of mysticism to the mix.  Just as the ‘ecstatic’ mode can lead to a deeper experience of the ‘universal spark’ that exists in all of us, the ‘enstatic’ mode can lead to, as Teilhard put it, a “clearer understanding of God in the world”.  Not only is the ‘universal spark’ to be more deeply experienced, it is to be more completely understood as a principle at work in both our lives and in the intensification of complexity that we experience as a species.

Next Week

This week we expanded the recognition of mysticism from the traditional religious experience of ecstasy to that of the ‘whole brained’ experience of enstaty.

Next week we will explore how this more comprehensive mode of human experience is necessary to our growth toward ‘fuller being’ as person even as it contributes to the continued activation of our potential as a species.

November 18, 2021 –  Resonance and Mysticism

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How can mysticism be seen as resonance with reality?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw mysticism as a building of the bridge to the future while we are walking on it.

This week we will take a look at yet another aspect of mysticism, that of ‘resonance”.

Resonance and Mysticism

Another approach to recognizing the play of mysticism in life is to recognize that mysticism is a natural manifestation of it.  Richard Rohr looks to the ancient mystics for clues of how they understood the experience of mysticism.  In the cases of Theresa of Avila and Hildegard of Bingen, he saw them as recognizing that

“The human person is a microcosm with a natural affinity for or resonance with its macrocosm, which many call God. Our little world reflects the big world. The key word here is resonance.”

   Rohr sees such resonance as that state of consciousness which

 “…allows your mind to resonate with what is visible and right in front of you. … it erases the separateness between the seer and the seen.”

   As with most of the facets of human consciousness that we have addressed, while Hildegard and Theresa’s mystical experiences were highly formed by their religious beliefs, the underlying experience itself is here seen as a mode of basic human consciousness.  As we have explored it, it is simply a skill which is, as Audre Lorde put it in her poem “The Unsayable’

“…the way we give names to the nameless so it can be thought.”

   From her insight, it is the transferal from the ‘felt’ to the ‘thought of’, or from our subjective intuition to our objective articulation.

Seen thusly, it can be seen as the insight which underlays every religious attempt to ‘articulate the noosphere’ (as Teilhard puts it).  And as we have addressed it here, it is the peering into the ‘not-yet-understood’ facet of reality with which we must deal while we attempt to understand it.

However, just because we cannot nail it down, Teilhard and all the mystics treat the ‘unarticulated’ as worthy of being ‘trusted’.  In Teilhard’s rendition of his own ‘descent into himself’, his search for the source of his life that we saw in our look at Teilhard’s seven steps of meditation, he ends with the insight that at the bottom of everything lies a principle that can be ‘trusted’.

   “Our mind is disturbed when we try to plumb the depth of the world beneath us.  But it reels still more when we try to number the favorable chances which must coincide at every moment if the least of living things is to survive and succeed in its enterprises.

   After the consciousness of being something other and something greater than myself- a second thing made me dizzy: Namely the supreme improbability, the tremendous unlikely-hood of finding myself existing in the heart of a world that has survived and succeeded in being a world.

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.”

Teilhard addresses this idea of the human facility of resonance with reality when he sees the reasoning process as consisting of both intuition and empiricism

“Intuition bursting upon a pile of facts”

   He goes a little further when he suggests that there is something in human consciousness that provides a subjective reaction as we approach a more complete understanding of the real.  The ‘aha’ moment is always accompanied by an ‘aha’ feeling.  Such a nonconscious physiological reaction to reality is experienced by all of us every day.  We say that we are ‘moved’ by a melody or a work of art, but exactly what happens among the neurotransmitters that connect our sensory organs, brain and body when this happens?  Such terms as ‘heartfelt’ are commonly used to address them, suggesting to some that the heart is, like the eyes and ears, a sensory organ itself. Do not we feel such physiological effects in our chest area?  Such physiological responses can be felt throughout our whole body as our hairs can ‘stand on end’, our ‘skin can crawl’, we can become lightheaded, we ‘tingle all over’.

Science can and does study such reactions, but a complete understanding of how such nonconscious physiological reactions result from a ‘mere’ conscious perception continues to elude us.

Such reactions are common, and they all suggest our capability to resonate with our macrocosm.

Thus, in its most basic form, mysticism is simply a name for this fundamental human capability.  How we make sense of these basic human reactions to external stimuli, however, is highly informed by what we believe about the stimuli itself.  Religious mystics will interpret these reactions in terms of what they believe to be true about reality, to the point where extreme physical reactions can occur, such as in the case of those with stigmata.

But, as Teilhard, Merton, Bourgeault and Rohr demonstrate, the thrill of the ‘aha’ sensation can also appear as a light for our exploration of reality in a way that clarifies our part in it.

Next Week

This week we addressed mysticism from the vantage point of ‘resonance’.  Next week we will move on to seeing it in the context of the many ‘duopolies’ which make up the multiple facets of human life

 

November 11, 2021 –  Seeing Everyday Life Mystically

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   How can we become adept at seeing daily life through the ‘lens of mysticism’

Today’s Post

Last week we looked at how the basic human exercises of ‘listening and seeing’ can underlay the development of seeing things mystically.  This week, we will carry this a little further, exploring how these basic skills can be better honed to allow us to become more deeply resonant to the insights that lie in the ‘liminal space’ of mysticism.

The ‘Interpretive Key’ to Secular Mysticism

Cynthia Bourgeault, in an article recently published in “Teilhard Studies”, uses the term ‘interpretive key’ to looking at reality through a mystical lens.  While her article focused on a much wider and deeper aspect of Teilhard’s vision (one which we will explore in a later post), it suggests, to a large degree, that we react to reality to the degree that we interpret it.  As we have been discussing in this series, the true mysticism is that which leads us into an understanding of reality that is more resonant with it.  This suggests that such an improved understanding would benefit from better lens of observing it.

We daily undertake life, peering into an uncertain future, acting to effect outcomes which we hope will move us ahead, and all our actions depend on how well we understand the situations with which we grapple.  A significant and constant stimulus which we must process is the information in which we are inundated.  The media which surrounds us requires a constant energy on our part to process and try to make sense of.

We spend a considerable part of our lives learning to do this, and to develop skills of doing so by which we can achieve some degree of becoming more whole, and better able to, as Teilhard suggests, “trim our sails to the winds of life” so that we can be “borne by a current toward the open sea”.

A key skill that is necessary for ‘trimming our sails’ is finding a means of interpreting the flood of information that besets us every day.  Having a well-developed way of reading every news article, listening to every news broadcast, and sorting candidate political positions is critical for putting such information into its proper context.  Not unlike the simple tool of arranging data into spreadsheets and plots, the right ‘interpretive key’ permits a more comprehensive picture of any subject to come into view.

We have used the example of Johan Norberg’s insights into recent global history to illustrate how the immense data amassed over the previous hundred fifty years can lead to the startling insight that something is happening in the human phenomenon that lifts our species to a fuller quality of life.  As he points out, this trend in human history was neither planned, expected nor explicitly managed, but required the belief among many people that it could be done.
The ‘interpretive key’ that this suggests is simply reading each piece of news, each new opinion, each assertion, each political promise, for evidence of the ‘current’ that Teilhard suggests and that Norberg articulates as he plumbs the underlying current flowing beneath the turbulence of global data.

Teilhard, of course, goes much further.  He would doubtlessly agree with Norberg that the data shows the positive upward flow of human evolution, since he understands that such human data is to be expected in a universe in which “everything which rises will converge”, and “fuller being comes from closer union which comes from fuller being”.  The findings of Norberg are not exemptions to Teilhard’s forecast of continuing human complexification, they are examples of it.

The problem, of course, is that, immersed as we are in the turbulent waves of existence, the underlying currents elude us.

Richard Rohr reflects on the thoughts of Charles Péguy (1873–1914), French poet and essayist on this subject

“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.  Spirituality’s goal is to get people to that deeper level, to the unified field or nondual thinking, where God alone can hold contradictions and paradox.”

   Thus, a key skill in distinguishing the waves from the current is ‘putting things together’ that are seen to be disjointed.
Teilhard proposed a very straightforward ‘interpretive skill” to putting things into a such a perspective, in his example of the cell.

“…the cell, like everything else in the world, cannot be understood (ie incorporated in a coherent system of the universe) unless we situate it on an evolutionary line between a past and a future”

      One such ‘interpretive key’ which is emerging in our culture is ‘recognition of the footprint.”  To make sense of any concept, we must put it into its larger timeline.  The ‘footprint’ begins to emerge when the precedents and probable outcomes begin to be seen.

When we addressed Norberg’s well-documented insights into global trends, we noted in the ‘history of fuel’, how the ‘footprint of fuel’ grew as humans began to understand the secondary costs of providing fuel began to expand into the complex configurations see today.  It has become common to question the real consequences of decisions about fuel.

For years, as the recognition that fossil fuels were nonrenewable, new sources have been sought.  Today, as such concepts as ‘electric-powered vehicles’ are seen as more sustainable, questions begin to surface about the ‘footprint’ of storage of electric power.  While the impact of emissions from operation of battery-operated vehicles will be reduced, what about the environmental impact of the many steps of producing batteries?  The impact on the environment as batteries are depleted and must be disposed of?

Each round of innovation and invention that occurs as we continue to increase our need for energy incurs wider and wider ripples of impact on the already complex milieu in which we live.  An ever widening net of insight is always needed to be able to keep up with this trend.

Next Week

This week we addressed how a truly integrated sense of mysticism is needed if we are going to continue to build our bridge to the future while we are walking on it.

Next week we will take a look at the different ways that such a mysticism can be seen as active in an integrated human life.

November 4, 2021 –  Developing The Skill of ‘Secular Mysticism’

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   Developing a ‘lens’ for seeing mundane life ‘mystically’

Today’s Post

Last week we addressed looking at life through a ‘lens’ of secular mysticism.

This week we will move on to seeing how the skills of ‘listening’ and ‘seeing’ can play out in human life

The Skills of Listening and Seeing

Teilhard suggests a simple and secular approach to developing such a skill.   To him, understanding the resonance between what is there and what we understand about what is there requires such a skill.  His ‘lens’ of such understanding was simply the context of evolution.  He starts with the assertion than to understand anything begins with the insight into where it comes from.  As he puts it, addressing the phenomena of the ‘cell’

“…the cell, like everything else in the world, cannot be understood (ie incorporated in a coherent system of the universe) unless we situate it on an evolutionary line between a past and a future”

   Applying it to our exploration of ‘the footprint’, a good start to understanding something is to see it in the context of ‘past to future’.

Take the humble ‘spreadsheet’ for example.  A spreadsheet is nothing more than a two-dimensional list with one set of categories listed in ‘rows’ and another set listed in ‘columns’.  In a spreadsheet about ‘exercise’, for example, the rows could list ‘days of the week’, and the column ‘miles walked’.  The ‘metadata’ extracted from such a spreadsheet could include ‘trends’, and the trends would become more highly articulated as the spreadsheet grows over time.
More metadata would emerge if a new column, ‘weight’, was added, and a new perspective on one’s health would slowly take place.  As a result, any decisions about changes to the exercise plan would be better grounded.  This exercise of extraction of insight from observation is one small example of the ‘peering into the space between what is there from what we think is there’.

One of the more powerful tools that can be used to analyze ‘data’ to form ‘insights’, are plots.  Reformatting the rows and columns of spreadsheets into plots, with ‘rows’ on one axis and ‘columns’ on the other, offers a more comprehensive insight into the data, showing such things as peaks, valleys, frequencies, and trends in a more intuitive way.  It is not that the basic data is meaningless, but that the organization of the data, first into rows and columns, then into plots, allows us to grasp the underlying data more meaningfully.  With these two new modes of presentation, we engage the data at different levels, affording deeper insights.  With the plots, for example, we ‘see’ things like peaks and valleys as visual constructs, not just data to be integrated in our minds.  This approach becomes more powerful as the data becomes more complex.  In our example, correlations between weight and exercise durations can be more clearly seen, and optimum durations can be explored.
But is this mysticism?  How can such activity possibly be in the same category as, say, that of St. Rosalie, engulfed in ecstatic swoon as depicted in Anthony van Dyck’s painting?  How can relatively mundane data analysis lead to the profound emotional experiences of a St. Rosalie or a St. Therese of Avila?

A partial answer lies in the combination of depth and width that we discussed above.

We saw in our examples of evolution in human life how the use of such ‘mundane’ techniques can be employed in addressing one of the most significant phenomena of the human species: human evolution.  In this example, we saw how Johan Norberg amasses a stunning ‘pile of facts’ into a format that allows such a ‘burst of intuition’ which clearly shows not only that we are evolving but how it can be objectively seen that we are doing it.

As far as comparing what was seen by Norberg to the ecstatic visions of Rosalie and Therese, imagine their reaction had either been able to see a future in which the miseries of the poor everywhere would have been so significantly alleviated, or the pains of the hungry abated, or the risks of childbearing so wonderfully minimized.  If their souls could have been so ecstatically moved by experiences of the nearness of the divine, such tangible evidence of work of the divine in human life would have added an even deeper dimension.
And could not an argument be advanced that, even if Norberg’s insights were truly mystical, they did not reflect the intimacy with God that is common to all mystics.  If we look at Norberg’s phenomenal results in his light of human progress, how could it be denied that whether or not we are aware of it, we are, as Teilhard puts it, “carried by a current to the open sea”.   Teilhard takes this insight one step further when he asserts that this current can be seen as the two ‘hands of God’.

“- the one which holds us so firmly that it is merged, in us, with the sources of life, and the other whose embrace is so wide that, at its slightest pressure, all the spheres of the universe respond harmoniously together.”

   Thus, whether or not we recognize it as such, we are being made even as we make ourselves.  The true miracle is not that it is happening, but that we are so unready to acknowledge it.  Perhaps an ecstatic state of eyes upward isn’t called for, but ‘eyes fully opened’ to the miracle that is gifted to us by the process of universal evolution certainly seems appropriate.

Next Week

This week we began to carry our look into mysticism into how it can be seen in the natural current of human life.

Next week we see how such natural manifestations of mysticism can be seen in the same context as that experienced by the great Western mystics in history.

October 28, 2021 –  Examples of Everyday Mysticism

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How can we see mysticism playing out in everyday life?

Today’s Post

For the past several weeks we have been addressing the venerable topic of ‘mysticism’ from the perspective of ‘The Secular Side of God’.  This perspective has led to the suggestion that mysticism occurs as a natural part of human life.  We are all mystics when we begin to accept our intuition as simply a way to peer into the indeterminate space between what we know empirically and what exists outside ourselves that is yet to be known.

This week, we will pursue such activity by looking at common examples of such mysticism.

Everyday Mysticism  
Western religion has done a disservice by evolving from the deeply experienced closeness to the divine that was so prized in the early church, to the dogmatic practice of hierarchically- imposed rituals that was common at the turn of the twentieth century.  This regrettable trend was resisted by the Church ‘Mothers and Fathers’, the ‘great mystics’ of Christianity, but they, too also left an unfortunate model for those who followed.  With their distancing from mainstream life, they also modelled the belief that life as commonly lived was not compatible with true spiritual life.  Their duality of ‘sacred’ vs ‘profane’ has persisted to this day.
These mystics, of course, certainly delved into the same ‘liminal space’ that we have been exploring. With their intense and highly focused gaze, what they saw clearly caused them to experience very profound, even ecstatic, feelings of closeness with the divine.  It has fallen to the modern mystics, such as Thomas Merton and Teilhard de Chardin to carry the practice of mysticism outward, in which it could lead to, as Teilhard puts it, “a clearer disclosure of God in the world.”
Life as it is lived is more commonly lived in such a way which does not permit a ‘turning from the world’, and mystics such as Teilhard suggest a ‘turning to the world’ as a path to spiritual growth.  One step along such a path is to recognize how our minds employ a ‘secular mysticism’ in the living of our lives.

The most common human practice that touches on mysticism is, or course, the arts.  To the person who learns to attune their senses to the ‘liminal space’ within us, a painting, a passage of poetry or a melody will result in an ineffable resonance within us.  The cosmic sadness of Albinoni’s adagio or the leap of joy from Beethoven’s Pastorale as we accompany his experience of the “Awakening of happy feelings on arrival in the country”.  Or the frizzon of dread as we watch McBeth march to his doom; that of terror as we hear the tinkling of bells as Montressor is bricked up in Poe’s ‘Cask of Amontillado’; the wistfulness of Wyeth’s ‘Christina’s World’.  All evidence of an inner sense that cannot articulate itself, and of the human skill of “making eternal the desperately fleeting moment” (Tennessee Williams),

But this inner sense comes into play in many more seemingly mundane ways.  Even with art, to some extent and for some small expenditure of time, a ‘turning away from the world’ is necessary.  What about the mysticism in the everyday encounters with life?

If we accept that the idea that peering into ‘liminal space’ is a general approach to mysticism, we should be able to see it at work in life beyond the emotions induced by such stimuli as art.  Teilhard proposes a more immediate, while less emotionally resonant, activity when he observes “the burst of intuition upon a pile of facts”.  Put this way, we are immersed in such mysticism as we live our lives.

Articulating Everyday Mysticism

One of the ways that mysticism can be seen as active in human thinking is the ‘footprint’.  From time immemorial, humans have had to live with the consequences of their actions.  Almost every decision precipitates an unintended consequence, and preparing for the unexpected is a skill necessary for not our own life, but for our evolution as a species as well.

Take the example of ‘fuel’ that we addressed as we looked at Norberg’s nine examples of evolution in human life.  There we traced the evolution of fuel as humans have used it in their ‘fix-break-fix’ process.  We noted how problems relating to earlier solutions to the need for energy led to better solutions but often incurred unintended consequences.  Here, we take note of how the understanding of such consequences and the planning for mitigating them has continued to widen as we have evolved to the present day.  The web of logistics, extraction of raw materials, environmental and economic impacts and many other aspects has become increasingly complex as the world’s need for energy has increased while natural materials are seen to decrease.  The ‘footprint’ associated with each new arrival of an energy source has increased even as the ability of the new sources has expanded to meet ever increasing needs.  The ‘next generation’ of sources of energy, such as solar, wind and nuclear power, and perhaps hydrogen engines, all come with their need for a wider and more complex matrix of causes and effects.

What is common to each round of the ‘fix-break-fix’ cycle is not only the increase in size of the ‘footprint’ that is required to make it happen, but more importantly our ability to better understand and prepare for consequences.  Such vision is yet another example of ‘peering into the liminal space’ that lies between our legacy grasp of the situation and a fuller realization of the consequences of any invention and improvement.
With the incessant barrage of ‘news’ that inundates us daily, we are confronted with a similar problem.  How to put it all into a clear perspective, to form a conclusion and choose a reaction?  The ‘footprint’ is active here as well.  A skill of ‘listening’ and ‘seeing’ is vital to our psychological well being if we are going to swim in such turgid waters.

Next Week

This week we began to carry our look into mysticism into not only how it can be seen in the natural current of human life but also of our need for it.

Next week we will take a look at how the principles of secular mysticism play out in daily human life.

October 21, 2021 –  The Scope of Mysticism

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As the depth of mystical insight increases, the scope widens

Today’s Post

     Last week we explored how Teilhard’s approach to mysticism moves it from the ‘ecstatic experience of a person removed from the pedestrian vagaries of ‘normal’ life’ to that which can be seen as simply the practice of clarifying our vision of ‘life as it is lived’.

This week we will explore this new facet a little further, recognizing that as our mysticism seeks a deeper understanding of life, this depth also offers a ‘wider’ field of view of reality.

Wider Vision

While ‘grounding’ mysticism by way of empirical resonance and balancing emotions is necessary for such clearer vision, the ‘field of view’ of the mystical sight must also increase to take in a more complete grasp of what is being seen.  Once again, the ‘evolutionary hermeneutic’ comes into play.  Whatever is seen is lodged in ‘spectra’.  Examples of such spectra are categories of ‘past and future’, ‘cause and effect’, and ‘precedent and consequence’.

Our human evolution clearly moves forward in a trial-and-error process, as we saw in addressing the risks of human evolution.  Despite its fragility and all the attendant danger, it is full of examples of improvements to our welfare that occur once causes of problems are more clearly understood and consequences more completely anticipated.  The improvements which emerge from these ‘fix-break-fix’ cycles can objectively be seen to emerge, as we saw in looking at how evolution works in the human species.  Norberg’s articulation of nine areas of human evolution not only show progress in human welfare, but they also show examples of how human society has better learned from its past while it is getting better at planning for its future.

How does this aspect of mysticism play out at the personal level?  Obviously, most actions that we take are preceded by our memory of the consequences of similar past actions, and anticipation of the consequences that can be expected.  Teilhard recommends that we always attempt the widest possible perspective on any situation which faces us.  His ‘widest’ perspective was ‘evolution’.

“Evolution: a theory, a system, a hypothesis? Not at all, but much more than that, a general condition to which all theories, all hypotheses, all systems, must henceforth bow and satisfy if they are to be thinkable and true. A light illuminating all facts, a curve all lines must follow.”

This perspective plays out in our personal level, as he writes,

“..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.”

   Such a grand vision, one with no less than a ‘field of view’ of the entire cosmos and its awesome depth of time, must be approached incrementally.  How can this be done?

The Widening of Vision

A very practical first step to understanding reality is to see it as an evolution by which we, and our surroundings, are being carried in a current towards the future.  Seeing it from this perspective is to begin seeing everything in terms of its predecessor and its successor.  Teilhard saw this particular context as essential to understanding anything.  He gives the example of the ‘cell’:

“…the cell, like everything else in the world, cannot be understood (ie incorporated in a coherent system of the universe) unless we situate it on an evolutionary line between a past and a future”

 Rohr notes how Bonaventure sees this as a step toward seeing God more clearly in life.

“Unless we are able to view things in terms of how they originate, how they are to return to their end, and how God shines forth in them, we will not be able to understand.”

   Such an insight, in addition to the better ‘seeing’ that it affords, also moves us to Teilhard’s second step of ‘fuller being’.  Rohr goes on to note that

“Bonaventure’s theology is never about trying to placate a distant or angry God, earn forgiveness, or find some abstract theory of justification. He is all cosmic optimism and hope! Once we lost this kind of mysticism, Christianity became preoccupied with fear, unworthiness, and guilt much more than being included in–and delighting in–an all-pervasive plan that is already in place.”

He goes on to say

“If we had listened to Bonaventure, he could have helped us move beyond the negative notion of history being a “fall from grace” and invited us into a positive notion of history as a slow but real transformation and emergence/evolution into ever-greater consciousness of who we eternally are in God. Bonaventure began with original blessing instead of original sin, and he ended where he began.”

   Bonaventure’s essential first step of mysticism also includes an example of what can be seen by applying it.  Bonaventure, as read by Rohr, understands that human evolution, and hence our personal spiritual evolution, is less a ‘fall’ from an initial perfection to a current state of imperfection, but more a ‘rise’ to a ‘fuller’ state.  Seeing it this way leads us to the understanding that we are heirs to a potentiality which is gratuitously granted us by the nature of our evolutionary process (Rohr’s ‘all pervasive plan’).  We are not, as Luther asserted, “piles of excrement” requiring Jesus’ sacrifice (or, as Luther put it, ‘covering by Christ’) but sparks of consciousness requiring more complete understanding of our innate goodness.

Next Week

This week we extended our look at ‘secular mysticism’ to the recognition of how the deepening of mysticism can lead to a broadening of its ‘field of view’

Next week we will look at a few examples of how ‘secular mysticism’ pervades everyday life.

October 14, 2021 –  Practical Mysticism

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

Today’s Post

     Last week we explored how Teilhard’s mysticism was grounded in the objective findings of science.  His unique perspective on science, without diminishing the significance of its findings, opened a fresh and new perspective on the teachings of religion without diminishing its insights into the human person.  This significant step towards a non-dualistic approach to reality brings a new facet of mysticism into focus.

This week we will explore this new facet.

Practical Mysticism

Teilhard’s approach to ‘making sense of things’ extends the traditional religious concept of ‘mysticism’ by recognizing its need for a ‘grounding’ by empirical thought.  Such grounding provides the intuitional imagination a natural step toward a clearer concept of objective reality.  In doing so, he introduced yet another insight into the evolutionary value of ‘thinking with the whole brain’.

The shift from understanding mysticism as a privileged ecstatic experience of a person removed from the pedestrian vagaries of ‘normal’ life can be seen as simply seeing it as the practice of learning to see ‘life as it is lived’.    Such clearer vision permits us to see reality, as Hopkins put it, as ‘charged with the grandeur of God’.

Richard Rohr opens this door with his ‘simple’ recognition of how Francis of Assisi understood mysticism:

“Francis of Assisi knew that the finite manifests the infinite, and the physical is the doorway to the spiritual. If we can accept this foundational principle we call “incarnation,” then all we need is right here and right now—in this world. This is the way to that! Heaven includes earth and earth includes heaven. There are not sacred and profane things, places, and moments. There are only sacred and desecrated things, places, and moments—and it is we alone who desecrate them by our lack of insight and reverence. It is one sacred universe, and we are all a part of it. In terms of a spiritual vision, we really cannot get any better or simpler than that.”

   If a critical facet of mysticism is simply recognizing the presence of such ‘incarnational’ threads in our lives, then the key skill required by mysticism is learning to see its fullness in the fullest way.

In his masterful work, “The Phenomenon of Man”, Teilhard asserts that the most important skill that we can develop is such ‘seeing’.

“Seeing.  We might say that the whole of life lies in that verb- if not ultimately, at least essentially.  Fuller being is closer union: such is the kernel and conclusion of this book.  But let us emphasize the point: union increases only through an increase in consciousness.  And that doubtless is why the history of the living world can be summarised as the elaboration of every more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen”.

   In this passage, he introduces his insight that for us to become fuller, to develop our potential for ‘person-ness’, we must become closer, and to become closer we must become more completely what we are capable of becoming.  He expresses this dyadic action in his insight that

“Fuller being comes from closer union, and closer union results from fuller being.”

   The essentials of our “increase in consciousness”, both in our growth as individual persons and our evolution as a species, are reflected in this succinct statement.  And he reflects the key activity, the “essence of the whole of life”, in the action of ‘seeing’.  We can paraphrase Teilhard’s statement about being and union with one that relates seeing to being:

“Clearer sight from fuller being, and fuller being from clearer sight.”

   Certainly, this would seem to be the case for our traditional mystics, that as our vision becomes more complete, we experience a ‘fullness’.

Robert Wright relates ‘seeing’ to ‘meditation’ in his book, “Why Buddhism is True”.  Meditation, in Wright’s view, is not a metaphysical route toward a higher plane.  It is a cognitive practice of self-exploration that underlines what contemporary psychology already knows to be true about the mind. ”

“According to Buddhist philosophy, both the problems we call therapeutical and the problems we call spiritual are a product of not seeing things clearly.  What’s more, in both cases this failure to see things clearly is in part a product of being misled by feelings.  And the first step toward seeing through these feelings is seeing them in the first place- becoming aware of how pervasively and subtly feelings influence our thought and behavior”

   Wright offers another aspect of such ‘practical mysticism’, the placing of our emotions into the appropriate context.  To him, it’s less ‘overcoming emotions’ than objectively recognizing the part that they have played in our process of ‘seeing’.

Next Week

This week we have continued our exploration of mysticism into the realm of practicality.  Having seen several perspectives on this slippery subject, we can begin to see it as a natural human practice that helps us to gain a clearer view of ourselves in a world more clearly seen.

Next week we will address still another facet of such ‘mysticism’, that of ‘scope’.

October 7, 2021 –  Empirical Mysticism

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What was unique about Teilhard’s mysticism?

Today’s Post

     Last week we took a second look at examples of ‘evolutionary mysticism’, seeing how Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ can lead to a deeper and wider grasp of both reality and our place in it as human persons.

This week we will look a little deeper how Teilhard’s insights into such reality bring a new and powerful facet to the traditional practice of mysticism.

Empiricism and Intuition

As we have addressed many times in this series, humans are capable of grasping realities in two different but overlapping modes.  In the ‘intuitive’ mode, popularly thought as taking place in the right hemisphere of the brain, reality isn’t addressed as it is objectively ‘in itself’, but more as it appears subjectively as an object of our consciousness.  As we saw a few weeks ago, when we fill in what’s missing from our attempt to ‘objectively’ make sense of reality, we are using ‘intuition’.  Intuition is usually contrasted with ‘empiricism’, which attempts to make sense of this reality using as little imagination as possible.

When a physicist weighs a rock, he seeks information about the rock that anyone else that wants to know will measure in the same way and get the same information.  This is the empirical mode of consciousness and underpins the success of science in developing what sense it makes of reality.

Empiricism and intuition are commonly thought of as opposites, even though when put into a time continuum, are simply different stages in any thought process.  When it comes to a concept as slippery as ‘mysticism’, the size of the gap between them seemingly becomes bigger.  Even though such great scientists as Newton and Einstein had their ‘mystical’ sides, most materialists would see the two sides as solidly blocked by the wall of objective evidence of whatever phenomenon they were addressing.

Teilhard clearly did not erect such a ‘wall’.  Addressing existence from Teilhard’s perspective opens us to seeing facets of an ever more deeply intertwined life in ever widening terms.  For eons, humans have understood this this, trying to articulate their intuitions into the narrow scope of human language and empirical observation, but limited by their evolutionary incompleteness.

As Tennessee Williams observed of one of our intuitional practices:

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

    But, the accumulation of empirical insight has increased over time.  As Norberg documents, as the empirical database has since blossomed the seeds of human maturity have begun to sprout more robustly over the past hundred fifty years.  This clearly demonstrates how a secular understanding of the ‘ground of being’ is emerging which offers not only increasing clarity and relevance to religious thought but an increasing focus on the human by Science.  Secular mysticism occurs when the inclusion of both approaches merge into a single, harmonized enterprise.

Through the lens of secular mysticism Science can be seen to dig deeper into an ever-expanding trove of objective observations towards the same deep core of existence that Religion has intuited for generations.  By the same token, Religion can be understood as refining its intuition of a ‘first cause’ which enriches all being by increased use of those insights provided by Science.

Teilhard was one of the first to recognize that these two oft-orthogonal enterprises are on parallel but convergent paths to an understanding of reality which enriches both the spiritual and material aspects of human existence.  His recognition reflects a true ‘widening of vision’, now become capable of effectively grasping both past and future as well as both material and spiritual, in a way that recognizes the presence of God in the world which underpins not only the part we play, but more importantly, the fullness which is possible to us as we play in it.  Teilhard once again uses the metaphor of the sphere to illustrate the potential relation between Science and Religion:

“Religion and Science obviously represent two different meridians on the sphere of our minds, and it would be wrong not to keep them separate (which is the concordist error).  But these two meridians must necessarily meet somewhere at a pole of common vision (which is the mean of coherence).  On a sphere it would be absurd (concordism) to confuse the meridians at the equator; but at the pole (coherence) they ought to rejoin each other by structural necessity.”

   Thus, Teilhard was unique in his insight that the intuition of Religion requires a ‘grounding’ in empiricism for it to achieve its full potential as a tool for enrichment of human life.  Blondel, in his insight recognized that the new view of reality provided by Science in the late eighteenth century opened the door to re-emergence of the ancient intuition of the intimacy of the underlying cause of reality.  Teilhard went one step further in articulating this ancient intuition into empirical terms.  In the new and expanded approach to mysticism that Teilhard pioneers, the many metaphors proposed by mystics for millennia take their rightful place in the human passage from an imagined construction of reality to increased recognition of them as steps of progress toward an increasingly integrated grasp of reality.

In doing so, both Blondel and Teilhard showed how by ‘grounding’ mysticism to a more complete and comprehensive empiricism can not only increase its relevancy to a society which is becoming more secular, but at the same time increase its potential to further the reach of Science into the realm of human life.

The Next Post

This week we looked at how Teilhard’s approach to ‘making sense of things’ extended the traditional religious concept of ‘mysticism’ by seeing its need for ‘grounding’ it in the recognition of the value of empirical thought to intuitional imagination.  In doing so, he introduced yet another insight into the evolutionary value of ‘thinking with the whole brain’.

Next week we will take a look at how such an integrated insight can lead to a ‘mysticism’ less typified by isolated ecstatic vision to one more germane to daily life.