From the Perspective of Paul and the Synoptic Gospels

Today’s Post

When we took a first look at religion through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ we viewed it as a potential tool for making sense of things and therefore as a resource for managing human evolution.

We went on to address traditional Western concepts of God and saw how using Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ permits the concept of God to be reinterpreted from its ‘supernatural’ hermeneutic into the recognition of and cooperation with the ‘cosmic spark’ that his ‘lens’ shows to be active in each of us.

We saw that this reinterpretation does not necessarily contradict the underlying kernels that lie at the basis of traditional Western expressions of belief.  In fact, as we have seen in the previous posts on ‘God’, these reinterpretations seem to resolve many of the dualities that are embedded in traditional religious tenets.  In doing so, it also begins to infuse religious concepts with insights which are more relevant to human life.

This week, we’ll begin to focus our inquiry into the cornerstone tenets of Western theology, beginning with the subject of Jesus, the basis of Christianity.

The Duality of Christianity

We have addressed many of the manifestations of ‘duality’ that appear in Western theology, as found in Judaism, Christianity, and the Greek influences on the continuing evolution of Christianity.  Dualistic concepts such as body/soul, this life/the next, sacred/profane, divine/human, good/evil and many others can be found in much of the ‘holy scripture’ which underlies Western religious thinking.

Such instances of duality can also be found in both the scriptural references to Jesus (the ‘New’ testament) as well as the theological development which has continued to unfold as Christianity assimilated Greek thought and became established as an agent for stability in the Roman empire as it expanded into Northern Europe.

These threads of duality have persisted during the evolution of the West and, as we saw a few weeks back, can still be found in the appearance and inevitable branching of the new science of psychology.  These traces were highlighted in our history of psychology, which pointed out how Freud’s dystopian theories of ‘the self’ were heavily influenced by the Luther’s Protestant duality between ‘man as the image of God’ and ‘man’s sinful nature’.  We also saw how branches of mid-twentieth century psychology leaned towards a more positive basis, in resonance with the more positive of these two Christian perspectives.

These contradictions can still be seen today in the ongoing tension between Evangelical fundamentalism and Liturgical expressions of Christianity, as well as the wide divide between the extremes of liberal and conservative politics.

And, as we shall see, another dimension of duality also rose as Christianity began to develop a ‘Christology’, a philosophical approach to understanding Jesus from Paul’s universal perspective, and how this new dimension gave rise to the novel idea of a “Trinity”.

What Do We Know Of Jesus and How Do We Know It?

The actual dates of the life of Jesus are not certain, and the first person to write about him seems to be Paul, some years after Jesus’ death.  All the other authors of the ‘New Testament’ seem to have come later, so it seems that no one who wrote of Jesus actually knew him but depended on stories which were prevalent in the many new gatherings which sprung up after his death.  We don’t seem to know much about these different ‘churches’ other than that they represented a very diverse collective memory of Jesus and his teachings.  Much of the diversity found in these churches reflected the dualities already present in the legacy Jewish scripture, (known by Christians as ‘Old Testament’ and by the Jews as ‘The Torah’), but many new dualisms emerged with the new thinking.

The ‘stories of Jesus’ that glued these early communities together all reflected the dualisms of their Jewish heritage, such as:

• Was God responsible for evil or was the source of evil elsewhere?
• Was God’s creation ‘good’ or ‘evil’?
• Was God a ‘loving father’ or a ‘vengeful judge’?
• Was The Torah “God’s Word”, and hence to be followed literally, or a perspective to be refined by latter teachers, such as Jesus?

Then there were the new dualisms, such as:

• Was Jesus God? Man?  God and man?
• What, specifically, was his relation to God?
• Was he ‘killed by God’ to atone for human sins?

The writings of Paul clearly show the diversity of belief that had appeared in the few years between Jesus’s death and Paul’s writing.  He consistently critiques beliefs found in the new churches, and his New Testament ‘letters’ contain instructions for ‘correct’ interpretations.

The First Perspective: The Synoptic Gospels

The first three ‘gospels’, stories of Jesus as formally accepted by the Christian church, are known as the synoptic gospels.  Thought to be authored by Mark, then Matthew and Luke, they seem to have been written some few years after Paul.  They depict Jesus as a Jewish man who was not considered to be more than a man during his lifetime, who offered often unpopular interpretations of the law of Moses (the Torah), ended up on the wrong side of the law, was condemned for political treason against Rome, was tortured and put to death by crucifixion, rose from the dead and ascended into heaven.

The synoptic gospels often depict Jesus as a ‘millennialist’, who predicted that God would soon intervene in human history and establish a kingdom on Earth, which would be led by the ‘Son of Man’.

Bart Erhman, biblical historian, in his book, “How Jesus Became God”, notes that the ‘miraculous’ depictions of the synoptic gospels, such as the virgin birth, healing the sick and resurrection, are not uncommon in the many myths of the ancient world, and appear in many stories of other ‘God Men’ born to virgins who ascended to heaven.  He goes as far as to suggest that these events in the synoptic gospels were proclaimed by the post-Jesus church to overcome the shame of the nature of Jesus’ execution as a common criminal, and to appeal to those who would have been familiar with these myths.

However, for all the commonality of the Jesus story with other such stories, Paul introduces a unique facet which is entirely new: that of ‘the Christ’.     The writings of Paul and the authors of the synoptic Gospels offer a picture of Jesus which emerged shortly after his death.   However, the writings of Paul surface a perspective on Jesus that is only lightly addressed in the synoptic gospels.  These writings open the door for a perspective of Jesus that will take the new church’s impact on human evolution far past that suggested as a ‘holy man’.

The Next Post

Next week we will how this perspective, first posed by Paul, was expanded significantly by the Gospel author, John, and then further evolved as the new church began to develop its ‘Christology’.

   What can it mean to ‘love God?’ 

Today’s Post             

In the past several weeks we have focused Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ on the use of meditation from the finding of God to the use of ‘secular meditation’ (psychology) in finding ourselves.  We have followed this thread as it appears in the science of psychology, noting its evolution as ‘assisted secular meditation’, and saw how it can lead us to an understanding of the person that Kierkegaard believed “to be that self that one truly is” and in so doing, move toward ‘fuller being’.

This week we will address how relating to this universal ‘ground of being’ that manifests itself in us can be seen as ‘love’.  Now that we have identified how God, the principle of existence, can be understood as the principle of life within us, we can explore what it can mean to say that such a ‘ground of being’ can be ‘loved’.

A Relook at Love

In today’s culture, it seems clear that few things are less tangible but more ubiquitous than ‘love’.  Our culture is rife with references to it: it is used to sell things, explain behavior, understood as a prompt to procreation, as fodder for poems and music, as themes to movies and books.  Nearly all these perceptions understand love primarily as an emotional, sentimental feeling.  Articulated thusly, it seems to offer a poor mechanism for connecting to the ‘ground of being’ that is active as the basis of our lives.

Even our Western religion has problems with it.  For many Christians, the emotional aspect of love far outweighs the ontological aspect: Love is more a sentimental ‘feeling good’ about God, Jesus, Mary, and the saints than the facet of the universal energy which effects our growth as it unites us.

Teilhard notes that in the systematic and ever-recursive action of evolution, from the big bang to the human person, the same phenomenon can be seen:

Two entities of like complexity unite, and the product is an entity of higher complexity, and thus greater in its potential for union.

Teilhard’s ontological insight to this evolutionary phenomenon can be summarized as

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

   Science observes this phenomenon as active in the evolution of simple matter from the first bosons which emerge from the initial pool of undifferentiated energy to the very complex molecules which constitute the building blocks of life.  In its focus on biological evolution as ‘replication’ the theory of Natural Selection assumes but fails to explain the continuation of this rise of complexity in living things.  Not only does complexity continue to rise in living things, it does so at a much higher rate.  This can be objectively traced in the evolution from simple cells to the neurons which underpin the human characteristic which we call ‘consciousness’.  Without such a fundamental principle of existence, evolution as we know it would not be possible, and the ‘stuff of the universe’ would remain forever at its initial featureless state.

Love As The Energy Of Evolution In The Human

Science documents an example of this upwelling of complexity in the ‘K-T’ event, some 65M years ago.  In this event, the fossil record shows the most evolved species on the planet as reptilian with the distinct increase in brain capacity found in the later reptiles.  After their extinction, the flow of increased complexity, active in the reptiles for millions of years, began to rise anew in the increasing evolution of mammals.  This phenomenon is echoed in the assertion by Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science, that

“If the tape of evolution were rewound, it would result species different from those seen today.”

    As we have seen, we can hardly expect such a powerful and inexorable upwelling of complexity, acting and increasing for over fourteen billion years, to stop with the human person.  There is every reason to recognize this agency of evolution as just as active in humans today as it has been throughout the history of the universe.  If we concur with Teilhard that humans are “evolution become aware of itself”, the question remains: how can we see it as active in our lives?

Teilhard observes that evolution proceeds via the ‘activation of energy’.  The unions of evolutionary products that raise the level of complexity do not occur in isolation: they are influenced and effected by the wash of energy which pervades the universe.  Atoms are unified by the strong and weak atomic forces, complex atoms by the fusion of simple atoms by gravity, atoms evolve into molecules under the play of chemical forces.

These energies are manifold, and different types of energy come into play at different rungs of complexity.  For example, gravity was unable to influence evolution until particles acquired mass.  This effect precipitated the gravitational compaction of Helium and Hydrogen atoms into stars which in turn effected complex atoms which in turn enabled molecules.  The forces of chemistry were mute until the arrival of molecules.  And the forces of love could not play their unifying role until the entities of evolution became conscious.  Love, seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, is therefore the latest manifestation of this energy: the one which effects human ‘complexification’.

Seen through Teilhard’s ‘lens’, the increasing complexity of living things results in the phenomenon of consciousness.  This subjects entities to the influence of energies so subtle as to be immeasurable yet so powerful as to energize the ascent of complexity to a level which is ‘consciousness aware of itself’.

John Haught provides a very succinct insight into this phenomenon.

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

The Action of Love

Teilhard addresses how this new manifestation of cosmic energy plays out in human relationships.

In a nutshell, he saw that our personal evolution, our personal growth, is the manifestation of the continuation of ‘complexification’ in the human species.  Teilhard sees this complexification as occurring in two basic recursive steps as we engage in the process of ‘becoming persons’.

He refers to the first step as ‘ex-centration’, in which we become more aware of our environment, and of other persons, and begin to lose the self-centeredness that framed our infancy.  As we become more adept at this, we become more open to others, and are more able to allow our relationships to mature.

We saw three weeks ago how Carl Rogers observes the evolving characteristics of maturation in therapy.   Rogers echoes Teilhard’s ‘ontological’ insight into love when he states that

“Change appears to come about through experience in a relationship”.

   As our relationships deepen, we can become aware of the regard which others hold for us, which in turn offers us a clearer, more objective, and more holistic vision of ourselves.

This results in the second step of ‘centration’, in which we become more ‘the person that we are’, and less ‘the person that we thought we were’.  And as we saw with the clinical observations of Dr. Rogers, we can become the more authentic and less centered person that we are capable of becoming.  As we become more adept at self-management, we are more able to engage in deep, personal relationships.  Thus, the cycle continues in a convergent spiral, increasingly focused on deeper maturity through closer relationships by which we enable deeper maturity.

Teilhard sees this convergent spiral acting within us as

“Fuller being from closer union.  Closer union from fuller being.”

    This spiral of ex-centration and centration has another effect as well.  Even as we are changed in a love relationship, this same evolving union changes those who we love even as it is changing us.  Each cycle has the potential of raising the ‘abundance of life’ (as described by Rogers) of the individuals involved.

Thus love, understood now as more ontological than emotional, is indeed a powerful force for our continued evolution.  As we grow, we become more able to love and thus more complete as persons.  As we become more complete, we are able to love more deeply.  As in the case of every step of evolution from the big bang to the present, we as entities unite to effect an entity which is more capable of uniting and in doing so thus becomes more ‘complex’.

Loving God

So, how does this approach to human love and evolution lead to a relationship with this universal force which is active in us?  What does it mean to say that we ‘love’ the ‘ground of being’?  How does Teilhard’s recursive dynamic of love play out in our relationship with God?

In the past few weeks, we have been exploring how our recognition of this inner agent of evolution is only the first step.  To flourish and grow, to evolve, we must learn not only to be aware of it but how to cooperate with it.  We must learn to trust it.

If we take Teilhard’s two-step process as basic to the activation of the energy of love, the answer is simple.  As Rogers points out, and nearly all religions teach, all personal growth requires a loss of ego, the ‘false self’.  It is always necessary for us to understand what beliefs, practices, and fears are part of the scaffolding, the shell, that we have erected in ourselves to protect us.  The act of trusting that we can survive the disassembly of this scaffolding requires our belief that the person who will emerge will not need them.

This inner trust is not something that another person can give us, it can only be accepted, and then only if we can acknowledge that it is innate, granted to us as our birthright, unearned and inextinguishable.  This inner realization is our connection with ourselves.  It can only be described as our love for ourselves, and hence is a love for the source of ourselves.  Such love isn’t necessarily an emotional state, but is more the recognition, the confident belief that the energy of the universe flows through us, trustworthy, gratuitous, and ever-present, combined with the decision to trust and cooperate with it.  It is the energy of the universe made manifest in human life, patiently awaiting our participation.

To love God therefore is to love ourselves, not in the vernacular of western culture as a superficial emotional or sentimental state, but to recognize, value and eventually learn to trust the principle of life as it is allowed to change our lives.

Seen thusly, God isn’t engaged as a supernatural person who requires our adoration, but rather in the recognition of the action of a universal force in each of us as clearly expressed by Teilhard as he tells of

 “…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.”

Even more to his point, he tells of what can happen such recognition arrives within us:

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

The Next Post

Having seen over the past few weeks how God can be understood, even recognized, even ‘loved’, as the sum total of all the forces of the universe brought to bear on that which effects our beings which are conscious of our consciousness, we can go on to see at how such an understanding of God can be found in a reinterpreted version of the most basic precepts of the Western systems of science and religion.

   Finding God through secular meditation

Today’s Post

In the last two weeks we have followed Carl Rogers as he described his observations of a client in the process of finding his kernel of person-ness, a process that we have referred to as “secular meditation”.  He also describes what emerges when we begin to trust and cooperate with this fundamental energy which Teilhard identifies as the ‘thread of evolution’, and Karen Alexander as the ‘cosmic spark’, as it rises in us.

This week we will take a summary relook at the three approaches we have addressed in the past few weeks, those of Sigmund Freud, Teilhard and Carl Rogers, as they relate to the process of ‘secular meditation’ in search of a ‘core of personness’.

From Freud: The Dark Side

Even the most casual study of human history reveals a ‘dark side’ of humanity.  All the great books of ancient religions recognize it and warn against a turgid undercurrent which thwarts our ‘better nature’.  To make things worse, with the explosion of popular media in our time, we are awash in the hyperventilating but financially rewarding reports of dystopia.

Sigmund Freud was the first to systematically apply the emerging practices of science to a study of the human person, and as we saw a few weeks ago, assembled a magnificent edifice of concepts, terminology and theory which was applicable to diagnosis and treatment of human emotional problems. Unfortunately, as we also saw, his premise of the dangerous nature of the basic human, combined with his disdain for 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 was seen to evolve from a non-human animal ancestor, complete with the ‘red tooth and claw’ predisposition that this entailed.  Freud 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’.  The “taming of ourselves” required the “taming of the ancestral animal within”.

While Freud (and Darwin) accurately identified these roots and how they affect us, they don’t consider another perspective on such evolution.  Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’ identified the many ‘transitional’ states of evolution, such as the formation of particles of matter from raw energy, atoms from subatomic particles, cells from highly complex molecules, and self-aware persons from otherwise conscious animals.  He points out that in every case the first manifestations of each of these ‘new’ entities initially are virtually indistinguishable from their predecessor.  He refers to the emergence of the earliest, prokaryotic (non-nucleus) cells as ‘dripping in molecularity’.  If it were possible to see them in a population of highly complex, non-living molecules (such as amino acids), it would be very difficult to distinguish them.  In contrast, at the evolutionary level of, say, neurological cells, the uniqueness of living tissue has become obviously differentiated from complex molecules.

Teilhard sees the same thing happening with the human.  Were it possible to see the first homo sapiens individual in a jungle filled with pre-humans, how would we tell them apart?  Today there would be no problem with such an observation.

We humans have indeed emerged as animals with more complex brains, but that makes all the difference.  The pre-humans, with only their reptilian and limbic brains, are at the mercy of their instinctual stimuli.  The reptiles fight or flee, breathe, eat, and procreate according to their basic, instinctual brain stimuli.  Mammals add new powers of nurturing offspring, clannish connections, and improved adaptation to environment changes.  These new behaviors, due to their new limbic brain, are in addition to the stimuli from their reptilian brains and endow them with more instinctive evolutionary fitness.

Even though we humans have a third layer to our brains, the instinctual stimuli of the lower brains is still active, but the neocortex provides the capability of modulating them.  The key manifestation of evolution in the human person can be found in the evolving skill of the neocortex to ‘ride herd’ on the instinctual stimuli of the lower brains.

So, even though Freud correctly recognizes the ‘dark side’, his assumption that the kernel of the person is dangerous does not consider that it is through engagement with this kernel that the human evolves from the emotional immaturity of the child toward the personal wholeness of the mature adult.  It’s not that the child’s essence is negative, but that its growth towards maturity is incomplete.

From Rogers: Toward the Light

As we have seen, Carl Rogers assumes 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, is incomplete and capable of personal evolution –growth– towards fuller being.

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 antithetical to some), but rather a basic, fundamental belief in the trustworthy nature of the basic self, and a willingness to cooperate with it.

While there might not be a universally accepted list of the characteristics of human happiness or articulation of human potential, Rogers’ list of the characteristics displayed by a person in the process of growing is not only an excellent beginning but universally applicable.

Combined with the unique (and universal) nature of Rogers’ therapeutic relationship, ‘religious’ concepts such as belief, faith and love not only assume a new, secular, meaning, but one more relevant to human life.  His approach offers a structure for a true, secular, employment of secular meditation as a means of self-discovery.

From Teilhard: The Light Itself

As we have frequently seen, Teilhard starts from the ‘other end’, describing how the ‘ground of being’ is manifest in the very basic manifold forces which power the evolution of the universe itself.  He describes how these forces combine to effect all that we can see and are not only active in the human as a species but in individual human persons as well.  In his view (and that of Blondel, Rohr and others), it is impossible to distinguish where these forces leave off and where we begin since each act of such distinguishing requires the action of this force as it rises in us.

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 myself, I am trustworthy”

Teilhard applies science to religion. “It is I, be not afraid”

As Teilhard affirms, finding ourselves is finding the thread of universal evolution as it rises in ourselves.  As Rogers discovers, the legacy that we receive as our basic human birthright can be trusted to power our growth towards more complete being.  God can not only be found, ‘He’ can be embraced.

The Next Post

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 individual lives,

with which we can come into contact

by searching for the kernel of ourselves

using the emerging insights of science,

the next post will now go on to the final stage of Relating to God: ‘Loving God’

   What can be found in in the ‘search for self’?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw in some detail how the approach developed by Carl Rogers was applied in his ‘guided inner search’ (our ‘secular meditation’) and how it resonated with Teilhard’s insistence that the personal core within us was an individual manifestation of the cosmic uplifting of all things, the energy of the ‘first cause’ working within us as within all things.

This week we will look a little deeper into how Rogers observed the finding of this inner core as he participated in the client’s emerging ability to cooperate with it.

What Rogers Found in His Clinical Experience

In Rogers’ clinical experience, he conducted many psychological surveys in which he observed the following changes taking place in his “clients” as they undergo therapy:

– The individual becomes more integrated as well as more effective

– Fewer of the characteristics are shown which are usually termed neurotic or psychotic, and more of the healthy, well-functioning person

– The perception of self changes and becomes more realistic

– They become more like the person they wish to be, and value themselves more highly

– They are more self-confident and self-directing

– They have a better understanding of themselves, become open to experience, and deny or represses less of their experience

– They become more accepting in their attitudes towards others, seeing others as more like themselves

Rogers saw the role of the therapist as “facilitating” these changes, fostering them by way of offering the client a relationship in which the client can feel safe enough to discover the value of the person that Kierkegaard believed “to be that self that one truly is”.

Rogers used the results seen in his clinical experience to articulate the steps which clients undergo as they become more aware of themselves and increasingly ready to cooperate with the energies of their lives.  He saw the following things happening in such a person:

– Feelings evolve from being remote and un-owned to fearlessly experienced in the immediate present

– Experiences evolve from very remote and meaningless to immediate, and as an acceptable referent for accurate meaning

– Congruence between experience and awareness becomes more complete as experience becomes safer

– Communication becomes clearer as the internal connection between feelings, experiences and awareness improves

– Problems become recognized, understood, and owned

– As experiences are perceived as a trustworthy guide to behavior in relationships, the danger perceived in relationships is lessened

The Person that Emerges From Assisted ‘Secular Meditation’

In general, Rogers saw the maturing person as

– Increasingly open to experience, which permits less defensiveness

– Increasingly “existential”; living more fully in each moment, in touch with experiences and feelings

– Increasingly trusting of his own organism, able to trust feelings and experiences

– Increasingly able to function more completely

So, against the Freudian belief that human persons are basically irrational, and that their impulses, if not controlled will lead to the destruction of others and self, Rogers saw the human person as capable of becoming freer, less defined by the past and more open to the future as he grows.  Since the basic nature of the human person is now seen as constructive and trustworthy, as he matures the person will become more creative and live more constructively.

The relationship that Rogers sees as necessary between the client and therapist is very like that seen in the mature love between human persons.  As Rogers asserts, echoing Teilhard,

“There seems every reason to hypothesize that the therapeutic relationship is only one instance of interpersonal relations, and that the same lawfulness governs all such relationships.”

   Every human relationship touches on some aspect of the characteristics that Rogers identifies in the process of “becoming a person”.  In all relationships, from the most intimate to the most fraternal, such skills as management and expression of feelings, owning of experience, congruence between experience and awareness, clarity of communication, responsibility for behavior and honesty manifest themselves in patience, empathy, and tolerance.  In all relationships, when we are welcomed into an accepting environment, we are able to move a little closer to “being that person that we are”, and when we welcome another in the same way, their own “becoming” is invited.

The Existentialists and Teilhard

The new perspective pioneered by the existentialists can be seen in the focus of Teilhard’s ‘lens’ onto

the human person as a product of evolution.   This insight itself comes from the emerging concept of general evolution in human thinking precipitated by the scientific discoveries of Cosmic “size”, “duration” and “unfolding”.  To begin to understand everything “in the process of evolving” can be interpreted as seeing everything “in the process of becoming”, since each step in evolution comes from ‘something’ becoming ‘something new’, and the new ‘something’ which results is more complex than its precedent.

Since the human person can be seen as simply the latest manifestation of this fundamental cosmic process, Teilhard asserts that we can expect the same dynamic to be working in our lives as well.  Each day offers us the opportunity to grow from the ‘someone’ that we are to a ‘new someone’ that we can become.  The new aspects of our person which emerge, if this growth is authentic, are consistent and congruent with the forces of the universe.  They are well articulated by Rogers and consistent with the positive expectations of the existentialists.

The Next Post

Next week we will recap where we have got to in our ‘Search for the Core of Personness’ or, In our vernacular, ’ Secular Meditation’.

   How has Psychology evolved In Its search for the “Cosmic Spark’ in the human person”?

Today’s Post

Last week we opened the subject of psychology as offering a secular approach to what the mystics have been practicing for millennia: finding God by finding ourselves.   We saw how Freud pioneered this undertaking in his objective, secular and empirical approach (as opposed to that of religious intuition).  We also saw how, while offering a magnificent array of new concepts, and working empirically, Freud’s psychology nonetheless seemed predicated on a very dystopian view of the human person.  To him, meditation, even via psychology, can be very dangerous indeed, since it shows our basic selves to be highly unreliable, even untrustworthy.

This week we will address an orthogonal approach to psychology which emerged in the last century.  This different approach, while also consistent with the empirical perspectives and methods of science, assumed a core of the human person which was radically different from Freud.

From Freud to Existentialism

As we saw in the previous post, Freud was successful in developing an integrated system of thought which objectively addressed the whole of human activity.  He pioneered the understanding of the human in terms of inner energies, motivations, stimuli and even “economies” that determine his development from birth to death.  Further, he did this while adopting the objective approach of science.

His treatment of human irrationality and sexuality is unmatched. However, his underlying materialism, misogyny and overall pessimism left him with a highly pessimistic outlook on the human person’s potential for satisfying relationships and personal maturity.

But we can find agreement between Freud and Teilhard on two things, such as the existence of a personal core of energy which underlies human growth and relationships, and understanding love as manifest in the reciprocal exchange of this energy between individual persons.

They sharply disagree, however, on the nature and source of this energy, and the role that this reciprocal exchange could have in growth, maturity, and even creation of the person involved in its exchange.  The difference between these two perspectives sharpens further when they are applied to human relationships at the social level.

Freud’s thinking began to be reevaluated and modified as an increasing number of Western psychologists began to assemble a large body of empirical data which could be analyzed to assess the propositions which originally formed the basis for Freud’s thinking.  The relationship between the analyst and the analyzed evolved as well, due to the increasing educational level of the middle class, the growing acceptability of psychology by religion, and the emergence of expectations on the part of those undergoing analysis.

The Pioneers of Existentialism

In the mid twentieth century, several psychologists emerged with a distinctively different and more positive understanding of the human person and the dynamics of personal growth and relationships with others.  This approach generally became known as “existential”.  Their general methods became known as ‘counselling’ and were adopted by in many religious expressions as “pastoral counselling”.

Rollo May understood the basic tenet of existential psychotherapy as “that which stands with scientific analysis as expressed in the genius of Freud”.  However, he saw the empirical data that science also brings into the picture as unfolding the understanding of the human person on a deeper and broader level than Freud.  This deeper understanding assumes with Freud that it is possible to have an objective ‘science of man’.  It does not, however, ‘fragmentize’ him by breaking him down, as did Freud, into compartments, and thus lose the grasp of the whole in the tangled archipelago of the parts.  Unlike therapeutic interpretation as practiced in Freudian psychoanalysis (which consists of referring a person’s experience to a pre-established theoretical framework) existential interpretation seeks to understand how the person himself subjectively experiences reality, then works with him toward actualizing his potential to become whole.

With May, psychology began to progress from analysis and diagnosis to guided inner search.  In doing so, it was emerging as assisted secular meditation.

   Abraham Maslow took a different approach. Instead of focusing on psychopathology and what goes wrong with people, he formulated a more positive account of human behavior which focused on what goes right. He was interested in human potential, and how it could be actualized.  He believed that each person has a desire for self-fulfillment; namely, the tendency for him to “become actualized in what he is potentially”.

As we have seen, this requires us to first find ourselves, and then cooperate with the primal force which rises within us, and in which lie our potentialities.

Ashley Montagu believed that as a consequence of humanity’s unique evolutionary history we are required to be highly cooperative to survive.  Therefore, he saw human drives as oriented in the direction of growth and development in relationship and cooperation.  He believed that what we are born for is “to live as if life and love were one”.  Like Teilhard, he subscribed to the belief that evolution rises along an axis, and that we are located, both as individuals and society, on that axis.

These pioneers believed that the core of human personality is positive, not irrational and weighted toward destruction as Freud believed.  Their clinical experience led them to recognize that the innermost core of man’s nature, at the deepest layers of his personality, the base of his “animal nature” is positive, basically socialized, forward-moving, rational, and realistic.  They saw the goal of psychology as first helping us find this inner self, then helping us learn to cooperate with it.

In scientific circles, however, this was a difficult concept to accept.  In psychology, science’s first foray into the human psyche, Freud and his followers presented convincing arguments that the id, man’s basic and unconscious nature, is primarily composed of instincts which would, if permitted expression, result in incest, murder, and other crimes.

In religious expressions as well, especially in the Luther-influenced conservative Christian traditions, our culture has been permeated with the concept that the human person is basically sinful (Luther’s “piles of manure covered by Christ”), and only by something approaching a miracle can this sinful nature be negated.  The whole problem of therapy, as seen by these groups, is how to successfully hold these untamed forces in check, rather than have them emerge in the costly fashion of the neurotic.

In contrast, the existentialists believed that the reason for this negative belief, held by many psychologists even today, lay in the fact that since therapy uncovers hostile and anti-social feelings, one must assume that this proves the deeper and therefore basic nature of the human person to be unrelentingly negative.  Only slowly has it become evident that these untamed and unsocial feelings are neither the deepest nor the strongest, and that the inner core of human personality is the organism itself which is, in addition to self-preserving, also highly social and capable of perfection.

The Next Post

This week we saw how the basic tenets of psychology began to evolve in the twentieth century from seeing the innate core of the person as ‘dangerous’ to seeing it as a positive and trustworthy basis for personal growth and successful relationships.  Next week we will look in more detail at how one of the most pivotal Existentialists applied this approach and the results he recorded.

   How has the ‘science’ of psychology emerged as a quest to find the ‘cosmic spark’ within us?

 Today’s Post

Last week we showed how Teilhard’s seven steps of meditation can be seen in terms of Karen Armstrong’s secular search for the ‘immortal spark’: that essential agent of cosmic evolution which increases complexity which eventually manifests itself as our core.  While Teilhard inevitably takes the tone of Western religious tradition, we saw how his approach to meditation is nonetheless basically secular.

This week we will carry this one step further: to look at how meditation, the traditional religious search for self, underlies a practice entirely devoid of religious belief: psychology.

The Emergence of Psychology

The increasing depth in the way that human persons began to experience themselves in the emerging awareness of their unique human person seen in the “Axial Age” also molded the form that this thinking was taking.  In doing so, human evolution began to move from attributing the vagaries of life to supernatural agencies to attempts to understand them as natural phenomena.  This movement gave rise to the empirical approaches of science.  Initially constrained to the ‘material’ world, this approach eventually began to apply itself to the human person itself, based on clinical observation instead of religious doctrine and biblical interpretation.

Sigmund Freud pioneered this new scientific approach to understanding the human person.  He applied the new methods of science to the making and testing of hypotheses of human growth and relationships. He was virtually the first major thinker to address the aspect of human nature which underlies sexuality (and therefore relationships) in objective, secular terms.

In Irving Singer’s comprehensive analysis of human relationships, “The Nature of Love”, he comments,

“Like other thinkers of the time, Freud sought to explain the human condition in terms of the rationalistic concepts that science was uncovering.  He proposed a completely new lexicon and analytic approach to understand the nature of “affect”, which includes all of what we normally call feelings, emotions, sensations, “intuitive” and “instinctive” dispositions, erotic attachments, hatred as well as love, and also kinesthetic impressions of any kind.  For that job we require a totally different type of methodology.”

   Historically, some thinkers, such as Plato, Plotinus, and Augustine, had generally proposed a positive interpretation of reality, believing that what is ultimate in reality sustains, even conforms to, human ideals; while others, such as Lucretius, and Hobbes came to see the universe as neutral, even hostile, to such optimistic assumptions.  Freud falls into this second, pessimistic, category.

Singer contrasts these two perspectives, showing the duality of thinking which results from this dichotomy:

”Philosophers have often tried to reduce the different senses of the word “love” to a single meaning that best suited their doctrinal position.  To the Platonists, “real love”, being a search for absolute beauty or goodness, must be good itself; to the Freudians, love is “really” amoral sexuality, though usually sublimated and deflected from its coital aim.  The Platonist argues that even sexuality belongs to a search for the ideal, and otherwise would not be called love in any sense.  The Freudian derives all ideals from attempts to satisfy organic needs, so that whatever Plato recommends must also be reducible to love as sexuality.”

 Freud In An Oversimplified Nutshell

Freud’s thinking provided a monumental, unprecedented, and unified approach to understanding the human person and relationships.  Like Teilhard’s finding of the ‘personal core’ addressed last week, Freud understood the person as an entity possessing a certain “life force” which empowers survival and procreation and is at the center of personal being.  He saw this force, identified as ‘libido’, based on sexual instinct, as the ultimate agent of human growth.

In Freud’s thinking, the libido therefore is a manifestation of the energy that nourishes the self, and he identified the object of the libido as sexual union.  Therefore, relationships that do not lead to sexual union interrupt the flow and replenishment of libido and lead to impoverishment of the self.  As Freud saw the self as initially focused on itself, the “narcissism” at birth represents a state to which the self always seeks returning.  “Nourishing the libido” therefore requires us to maintain our narcissism which is essential to our sense of self.

Freud believed that relationships required the person to “idealize” others; it was necessary for the lover to transfer an ideal to his beloved that he has difficulty achieving within himself.  To Freud, we love that in the other person which we feel will compensate for our inadequacies, and thus we will recover the security of primal narcissism and by doing so maintain our libido.  The dependence upon relationships, in Freud’s approach, was therefore risky.  Failed relationships would undermine our libido and therefore diminish ourselves.

Further, Freud saw the force of libido as possessing an undercurrent of hate.  He therefore saw love as the mixture of ‘eros’ with “man’s natural aggressive instinct (the’ death drive’)”, which is inseparable from it. 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 Freud saw love as energy, and one which effects the uniting of human persons, the resulting relationships were potentially harmful to the person because they are predicated on a personal core which is not to be trusted.

Love is dangerous, as he saw it, because at our core we ourselves are dangerous.

While Teilhard heard a voice from the bottomless abyss from which flowed his life: “It is I, be not afraid”, Freud would have heard a different voice: “It is ego, be very afraid”.

While Freud understood the human kernel as energy, and one which effects the uniting of human persons, its complex love/hate constitution leads to relationships which could harm the person.  Due to this underlying flaw in our basic core, he asserts, not only does love fail to solve human problems, but can cause them as well.

Thus, Freud, while pioneering the objective secular application of science to the study of the human person, nonetheless arrives at a position orthogonal to 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.

The Next Post

Freud’s approach to psychiatry, like Luther’s earlier approach to Christianity, burst upon emerging Western society and immediately began to ramify into parallel but radically different expressions.  As can be seen in today’s versions of psychotherapy, American positivism has muted much of Freud’s pessimism, materialism, and misogyny.  Many of these newer approaches to psychology focus equally on the relation between therapist and patient as well as the therapist’s skill in plumbing, analyzing, and articulating the labyrinthine depths of the patient.

Next week we will examine such different approaches and explore how they can be seen as ‘secular’ versions of meditation’.

How does Teilhard use his ‘lens’ to open the door to connecting to God?

Today’s Post

Last week we saw how the recognition of the ‘core of person’, and the realization that such a core is also a manifestation of Karen Armstrong’s ‘immortal spark’, is that which connects us to the universal agency which ‘sustains and gives life to the entire cosmos’.  While this recognition may well bring us closer to a clearer understanding of God, it still does not address how a relationship with such a God is possible.

This week we’ll apply Teilhard’s ‘lens’ to the opening of that door.

Teilhard’s Seven Steps of Meditation

All religions include rituals that are intended to put us in touch with the ultimate ground of being, be it the Eastern Brahman or the Western God.  One practice common to most of them is ‘meditation’, the goal of which is both increased awareness of ourselves and of this ultimate life force which lies at our core.

Of course, while each expression may have the same goal of finding both our ‘true’ selves and this ‘core’, each brings its unique presuppositions to the practice.  As a result, the word ‘meditation’ often brings with it a presumption of some religious dogma or hermeneutic, hence introducing this concept here might be seen as distinctively contrary to the ‘secular’ approach employed in Teilhard’s ‘lens’.  As we shall see, however, echoing Richard Dawkins, “the divesting of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries” works equally well as a method for experiencing God as it did for his definition.

We’ll start with an example of Teilhard’s use of his ‘lens of evolution’, which closely follows Maurice Blondel in understanding God as the ‘immanent ground of being’.  Teilhard described this experience of meditation in his book, “The Divine Milieu”. This description is independent (“divested of the baggage”) of most traditional religious assumptions and demonstrates a framework for a ‘personal contact’ with God as we are exploring.

Step 1: Recognizing the Facets of our Person

  “And so, for the first time in my life, perhaps, I took the lamp and, leaving the zones of everyday occupations and relationships, where my identity, my perception of myself is so dependent on my profession, my roles- where everything seems clear, I went down into my inmost self, to the deep abyss whence I feel dimly that my power of action emanates.”

   Here Teilhard begins with an exploration of the ‘scaffolding’ of his person: those influences which affect the development of personality: beliefs, faiths, and fears.  How much of who we are and what we believe have we consciously accepted, as opposed to those facades which we have erected as a protective skin to ward off the dangers of life?

Step 2: Moving past the Safety of the Scaffolding

   “But as I descended further and further from that level of conventional certainties by which social life is so superficially illuminated, I became aware that I was losing contact with myself.  At each step of the descent, with the removal of layers of my identity defined from without, a new person was disclosed within me of whose name I was no longer sure, and who no longer obeyed me. “

  How can we begin to objectively see ourselves, steeped in our facades and scaffolding as we are?  What happens when we begin to recognize these facades and scaffoldings, and try to imagine the consequence of divesting ourselves of them?  How can we ultimately trust that what lies beneath is indeed ‘trustworthy’?  Upon what can we place our faith in our capacity for the ‘dangerous actions’ that we must undertake each day?

Step 3: Encountering the Font of Our Consciousness

   “And when I had to stop my descent because the path faded from beneath my steps, I found a bottomless abyss at my feet, and from it flowed, arising I know not from where, the current which I dare to call my life.”

   Where does our life come from?  Every day we are barraged by stimuli from our instinctual brains, fears, elations, and ideas that arrive unbidden from what we refer to as our ‘unconscious’.   One philosopher refers to our life as “what happens while we were making other plans”.  How does that happen?

Step 4: Facing the Intangibility of the Font

   “What science will ever be able to reveal to man the origin, nature, and character of that conscious power to will and to love which constitutes his life?  It is certainly not our effort, nor the effort of anyone around us, which set that current in motion.  And it is certainly not our anxious care, nor that of any friend of ours, which prevents its ebb or controls its turbulence.    We can, of course, trace back through generations some of the antecedents of the torrent which bears us along; and we can, by means of certain moral and physical disciplines and stimulations, regularize or enlarge the aperture through which the torrent is released into us.”

   While we might well recognize that there is a font from which flows the stuff from which we are made, it cannot be empirically articulated.  Whatever the source, it is beyond our grasp.

Step 5: Accepting Our Powerlessness Over The Source of Our Life

   “But neither that geography nor those artifices help us in theory or in practice to harness the sources of life.  My self is given to me far more than it is formed by me.  Man, scripture says, cannot add a cubit to his nature.  Still less can he add a unit to the potential of his love, or accelerate by another unit the fundamental rhythm which regulates the ripening of his mind and heart.  In the last resort, the profound life, the fontal life, the new-born life, escapes our life entirely.”

   In addition to our inability to rationally and empirically articulate this flow of life into us, we are also unable to control it.  Our only choice is to accept it and come to enough appreciation of it that we are able to cooperate with it.

Step 6: Recognizing our Entwinement in the Fabric of Existence

  “Stirred by my discovery, I then wanted to return to the light of day and forget the disturbing enigma in the comfortable surroundings of familiar things, to begin living again at the surface without imprudently plumbing the depths of the abyss.  But then, beneath this very spectacle of the turmoil of life, there re-appeared before my newly-opened eyes, the unknown that I wanted to escape.  This time it was not hiding at the bottom of an abyss; it disguised itself, its presence, in the innumerable strands which form the web of chance, the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality are woven.  Yet it was the same mystery without a doubt: I recognized it.”

   Teilhard recognizes not only the source of life within us, but how this source is also interwoven into the ‘innumerable strands which form “…the very stuff of which the universe and my own small individuality are woven.”

Step 7: Recognizing the Face of the Ground of Being

   “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.”

How do I dare believe that whatever is at the source of my being, indeed of all being, it is nonetheless (As Blondel puts it) ‘on my side’?  How is it possible to see this ‘fontal’ life which pours into me at each moment as an individual instantiation of the general forces which have brought (and are still bringing) the universe into fuller being?  How do I dare trust that these forces, welling up over billions of years, will continue to well up in me.?   How can I begin to recognize, trust and more importantly cooperate with this inner source of energy so that I can be carried onto a more complete possession of myself?

In this short but very personal and straightforward description of the journey into himself, Teilhard offers an outline of meditation that is ‘secular’ but addresses the full gamut of a quest for the ‘ground of being’ that is within us that we call God.

Secular Meditation

There is nothing religious about these seven steps.  The assumptions about the nature of the universe that science and biology assert, once the phenomenon of increasing complexity is added, are all that is necessary to state them.  As Teilhard suggests, the addition of this phenomenon, while not yet a specific scientific theory, is not only necessary for inclusion of the human person into the scope of scientific enquiry, it is also necessary for the process of universal evolution itself.

A universe without increasing complexity would not evolve.

There is a similarity between these seven steps and the very successful “Ten Steps” of Alcoholics Anonymous.  The foundational step of exploring and learning to trust oneself is at the basis of much of Western thinking.  Psychology, as we will see in the next few weeks, can therefore be seen as ‘secular meditation’.

The Next Post

This week we explored Teilhard’s approach to meditation as a skill through which we can make contact with our ‘core of being’, and through this with God.  We saw his meditation exercise in the practical and secular seven steps he took in his search for the ‘cosmic spark’ which enlivens all things.

Next week we will move on to see how psychology can be seen as a form of “secular meditation”.