What’s Happening?

A person is neither a thing nor a process, but an opening or clearing through which the Absolute can manifest.

Martin Heidegger

            A holistic movement emerged in the twentieth-century to reconnect the secular and sacred realms, the One and its manifold parts, and make knowledge and experience whole again.  With the exhaustion of the assumptions of secular, materialist philosophy, there appeared the desire to again expand the universe of human knowledge into the spiritual dimensions.  The movement remains groping to be sure, but it is there nonetheless.  It is emblematic of the intellectual ferment of our times: a ferment about which, I think, education should be aware, because students are living in this environment of thought and need to know how to find their way around this new land, which is also the land renewed.  Modern science is starting to investigate and acknowledge that something intelligent is, indeed, out there!  And if the spiritual is everywhere at once, then what is “out there” might be the same thing as what is “in here.”  In the words of one of astrophysics’ most eminent practitioners, Sir James Jeans, “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.”  So do human beings!      

            Such movements take many forms, but those that start from within secular thought usually take Nature, human reason, or the “unconscious” to be their God.   

            Much of this spiritual search takes the form of an exploration and celebration of the off-beat, the weird, and the so-called irrational. These range all the way from joining obscure sects, to palmistry, numerology, reading tarot cards and astrology charts, and the more disjointed art movements that were in such favor early last century, such as Dada.  Recently the huge popularity of movies and books like What the Bleep and The Secret, which often hearken back to alchemy and the Corpus Hermeticum, and the books on Intentionality, attest to a burgeoning interest in matters spiritual as they can influence and transform our lives on a psychological and practical level of wealth attraction.  

            Within the more “rationalistic” world of science and philosophy, the exploration is toward a unified conceptual understanding of the natural and human worlds. This goes either back to the beginnings of thought to revive myth, or forward to the ends of the earth in universal concepts and Unified Field Theories.  Thus we hear contemporary philosophers of environment speaking of “deep ecology”–the hypothesis that the planet itself is a living, breathing and self-regulating organism, a conception based upon a return to Gaia of early Greek mythology.  Chardin wrote of the “noosphere”, (The Phenomenon of Man) and Gregory Bateson defined the sacred as “the pattern that connects:” (Angels Fear: Towards an Epistemology of the Sacred) that is, an integrated fabric of mental process that envelops all life on earth, like the Systems Theorists.        

            But this promiscuous search has its own perils.  Psychologist, William James, said of omni-directional spiritual search:  “All that the facts require is that the power should be both other and larger than our conscious selves.  Anything larger will do, if only it be large enough to trust for the next step.  It need not be infinite, it need not be solitary.  It might conceivably even be only a larger and more godlike self, of which the present self would then be but the mutilated expression, and the universe might conceivably be a collection of such selves, of different degrees of inclusiveness, with no absolute unity realized in it at all.” (The Varieties of Religious Experience:Postscript)  We can be lead astray by our own best intentions.  We must, rather, be guided.

            But what is common to all these movements is the attempt to expand the knowledge world–to resacralize or re-enchant the world after hundreds of years of trying to demythologize and disenchant it.  It tries to inject a kind of spirituality into the stale feelings and blunt sensibility of our artificial civilization and complex rational mentality.  Such “spirituality” is the kind of thing the mind comes up with when it perceives something larger than or outside itself, but doesn’t want to call it God, or to acknowledge the objective existence of a Higher Power.  It is rooted still in the human and rational, that is what is understandable to the cognitive agent generating human knowledge, or in the irrational and natural.  Its mistake is the opposite to that of past religion. As pre-scientific religion sealed off the objective lower world of Nature from investigation, so, too, secular knowledge seals off the higher world of spirit, the sacred dimension, as an objective dimension standing apart from any human conception of it.  Instead, it sees only spirit’s forms in the mind and takes these not as the reflections that they are, but as realities in themselves.

            But as it was not “real” religion that science attacked, it is not real science, which is the systematic investigation into the regularities of the universe, which is being attacked and undermined now.  Rather what is being driven out is a “science” that took the “the real” to be exclusively that which is exhaustively defined by the contingent, the relative, and the sensible.  Modern, positivistic science blossomed on fundamentally secular, mechanistic assumptions about the world, assumptions for which there has never been any conclusive proof.   This has always been a source of anxiety.  To relieve this anxiety science grew into “scientism”; a crude ideological club for determining “truth” by legislating the assumptions by which it can be investigated.  Scientism has failed to grasp the fact that scientific thought is never a substitute for religious needs and capacities, but a complement to them.  This attitude has hardened into exactly the same kind of “religious” dogma science rebelled against, dogma backed by its own priesthood and rituals of publication designed to keep competing voices silenced or out of the picture altogether.  Such science refuses to let metaphysical questions even be asked.  The human spirit will always seek completion, harmony, reconciliation, balance.  So whether the knowledge is weighted too much on either the religious side or the science side, the spirit will work for adjustment.  

            To understand higher spiritual realities we must surrender secular and scientistic assumptions about what is or can be real, what matters and why, else spiritual assumptions will make no sense, or poor sense. To surrender does not mean to throw them out altogether, but to surrender their stranglehold on understanding. 

            The sacred and secular are already converging, drawn toward each other, one from Above the other from below, and when they achieve harmony human intelligence will no longer be caught in the crossfire between fact and faith.  We have already seen that today true science is exploring the sacred as some kind of unifying mental pattern holding the material world together.  Concurrently, there is an efflorescence of religion because the materialistic scientific paradigm is exhausted.  What started long ago as a structure of religious intuition gradually unfolded into a historical sequences of rational, scientific knowledge which have now enfolded into a structure of science of the universe that mirrors the religious view of the creation.  Science and religion have become symmetrical systems of knowledge.  We can now build the spiritual sciences.  Marilyn Ferguson wrote: “Spiritual or mystical experience is the mirror image of science—a direct perception of nature’s unity, the inside of the mysteries that science tries valiantly to know from the outside.  This way of understanding predates science by thousands of years.”(The Aquarian Conspiracy: 362)    

            Or, to use another metaphor, science and religion can be seen as starting at opposite points of a sphere and working toward a common center.  It is the way of religion to infer material truths from perceived spiritual realities. Its truths are figuratively apprehended. Science infers spiritual truths from known material realities.  Its truths are factually comprehended.  Where religion and science meet is the point where faith meets physics, where is the opening  to the Absolute that Heidegger's quote indicates. 

            Real education can draw no sharp line forever dividing sacred from secular concerns, for properly speaking, the universe is one creation.  All education, therefore, is one, because all learning is one.  Learning is one because education exists, finally, not to serve the interests of the state and not just to train students for some vocation. It exists to develop the whole person – heart, soul and intelligence, for serving the common good and seeking knowledge and virtues, and expanding consciousness in the exploration of reality in all its facets and levels. To develop the whole person is to nurture the unfoldment of the inexhaustible potentials of the sign of God that is the essential form of every created thing and every human being.