Our Current Superstition

I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition. … We have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world.

(John Eccles, Evolution of the Brain: Creation of the Self: 241)

Baha’u’llah states that His revelation holds the keys to the sciences, arts and knowledge.  He means by this claim that His Revelation holds the keys to new sciences, arts and knowledge, for the established sciences and arts of His and prior days had already been unlocked.   So hidden away in His metaphors, analogies and statements are the principles of a whole new kind of epistemology.  But our minds must be reconfigured to grasp them.  So complete may be that change as to make current science seem as superstition, as science calls the more imaginative statements of truth in myth and fable.

I am not alone in thinking this.  The lead quote from noted neuroscientist and Nobel Prize winner John Eccles also states this.  Another Nobel winner, physicist Erwin Schrodinger, wrote, “I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is very deficient. It gives a lot of factual information, puts all our experience in a magnificently consistent order, but it is ghastly silent about all and sundry that is really near to our heart, that really matters to us. It cannot tell us a word about red and blue, bitter and sweet, physical pain and physical delight; it knows nothing of beautiful and ugly, good or bad, God and eternity. Science sometimes pretends to answer questions in these domains, but the answers are very often so silly that we are not inclined to take them seriously.” (Nature and the Greeks: 93)

Spiritual knowing is a new and different kind of epistemology, one that overthrows the current scientific model, by incorporating it within a more complexly integrated one.  So we need a new epistemological attitude, a wider set of beliefs concerning what is acceptable to know and who is acceptable to speak it.  It remains fundamental to the advance of knowledge that every view and insight must be empirically verified.  We do not throw out the intellectual today any more than when we advanced into the intellectual we threw out the senses.  But this new knowledge is also different.

It is knowledge gained from the keys provided by Revelation, and not any of the forms of it that constitute human learning, such as art, science, poetry and philosophy, which are the human responses to it.  ‘Abdu’l-Baha says: “You must endeavor to understand the mysteries of God, attain the ideal knowledge and arrive at the station of vision, acquiring directly from the Sun of Reality and receiving a destined portion from the ancient bestowal of God.” (The Promulgation of Universal Peace: 263)   Spiritual epistemology’s principles include “keenness of understanding is due to keenness of vision” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 35) and faith plays a “central role in consciousness.” (One Common Faith: 5)  There are other criteria.  Baha’u’llah wrote: “The understanding of His words and the comprehension of the utterances of the Birds of Heaven are in no wise dependent upon human learning.  They depend solely upon purity of heart, chastity of soul and freedom of spirit.” (The Kitab-i-Iqan (The Book of Certitude): 211)   Hence every human being that possesses “purity of heart, chastity of soul and freedom of spirit”, who envisions new truth and believes faith is not blind acceptance of authority but a perceiving of new Reality, is automatically a member of the great circle of acceptable speakers of truth.  There are no more religious or scientific priests to interpret the Word for us. 

Hence spiritual knowing is not just some happy combination of science and myth, but something more than both.  Let us call it direct perception of spirit encoded in symbols.  It is going to be some time before we enter fully into the regime of spiritual knowledge.  We are now in the first stages of this vast, unparalleled transition.  As I said before, the emerging sciences are sciences of process and not of state—bridges to reality in ‘Abdu’l-Bahá’s phrase.  Perhaps that is because humanity is transitioning out of one state of mind into another, and the sciences and arts, poets and philosophers, mystics and materialists, are all simply registering the stages of this universal process that moves from cosmos through chaos into a new cosmological understanding, accelerating by several orders of magnitude and complexity every decade, as the energy waves of a new revelation pass through and reconfigure the human intelligence. 

In similar fashion, myths were the “sciences of process” of antiquity, that long ago period when humanity moved from an animal signal-awareness to a larger symbol-manipulating mind, and education changed from the natural to the human.  Today a universal birth of humanity into the spiritual state is occurring and new being always births new ways of thinking.  We are in the time of divine education.  Once we get better grounding in our new state sciences of that state will appear on the threshold of consciousness. 

But, for a while anyway, it is the old way in new form—the strange juxtaposition of twilight with the dawn’s early light without any intervening night.  A new ratio of understanding is everywhere emerging.  Past myths, arts, and sciences in their respective though smaller transitions provide useful analogies and examples to what Shoghi Effendi called an “organic change in the structure of present-day society, a change such as the world has not yet experienced.” (The World Order of Baha’u’llah: 43)  We are again very close to the sacred, so close that the current of truth can leap the narrow gap, like Michelangelo’s great painting of God and Adam on the Sistine ceiling.  We are, in fact, with Baha’u’llah’s Revelation at the very center and essence of spirit, the mid-most heart of creation itself.  This is the Age of God.  Thus all those times in history when we were close to the spiritual can return today as fertilizing analogies to our thought.   

This is the time when we shall construct sacred sciences and pioneers abound in this endeavor.  Material science sought to establish a strictly physical sequence of causation for all phenomena, which being in time and organic flow this causation can only be linear and efficient causality, and to encase humanness itself in conceptual abstractions of human nature that yielded a system of positive sciences generating empirical facts and knowledge.  Sacred science starts from the assumption that an energetic, causal spiritual world precedes, not sequentially but formally, the material, quantitative world of effects.  Spirit is the plane of causation.  It is the first principles and laws of spiritual genesis flowing into laws of material generation of the new which is also renewal.  Causation, then, is not just linear and sequential but also formal and simultaneous, and is the coordination of these causes.  Next post will make a little detour to examine the nature of formal causality.  It is central to understanding spiritual knowledge.

A direct link to my book, Renewing the Sacred is http://tinyurl.com/cndew5a It is now also in Kindle

New Directions for Knowledge

This is a new cycle of human power.

(Abdu’l-Baha in London:19)

Another great but narrowing rift between myth and science is their notions of causality.  Traditional science works on the premise of A before B, where A is both necessary and possibly sufficient to cause B.  It is sequentially efficient causality, like the mechanized assembly-line that builds your car.  The imaginative causality of myth is the “let this be” of the poetic faculty, (the “And God said of the Bible”) which is very close to the kind of non-local everything is in everything causality science is now exploring in Quantum Mechanics (sometimes called “the science of possibility”), Chaos Theory, Complexity science.  It is structured and formal causality, the instant metamorphosis of one thing into another, as in a dream, or the everywhere–at-once power of a field to bring forth novelty.

These new sciences are sciences of process not of state, of becoming not being, as myth is an imaginative statement of process and metamorphosis.  Some of these new sciences, like Systems Theory, also are sciences of the global nature of things, of the universal behavior of complexity, or the iterative fractal patterns that appear and reappear on different scales at the same time, where change often occurs from a sensitive dependence on initial conditions which can end in catastrophic consequences, as the butterfly flapping its wings in the Amazon ends as the typhoon ravaging Japan.  This causality works because of the inescapable consequence of the way that small scales intertwine with large ones. 

These are sciences where nonlinear equations rule, of  “deterministic chaos where simply-formulated systems with only a few variables display highly complicated behavior that is unpredictable,” of fixing the laws of motion to explain the patterns of unfixed “particles”, of movements circling around computer patterns called strange attractors, those bizarre, infinitely tangled abstractions, those goblins of the mind, that nevertheless yield simple, structural patterns at their core, for an attractor signals on one level pure disorder because no point ever recurs, but this disorder is the entry to a new kind of order, like breaking the sound barrier in a plane.  These are sciences where infinite instability ends in stability and randomness morphs into order through a sort of self-organization.  Non-periodicity is unpredictability, but the whole is still there, because both chaos and order spontaneously arise in systems.  In short, while myth and language use primarily a formal causality, science uses primarily an efficient causality to explain phenomena.  But, again, when pattern-recognition and the perception of things like gestalts take precedence, then formal causality regains some prestige.

While differences of approach and content exist, these may increasingly only reflect differences of terminology.  Quantum physicists use terms like the Zero Point Field and the Quantum Vacuum to describe the same fundamental entity as do the names ether and the akashic of Greek and Hindu alchemical traditions, with ether making a sort of comeback. Now there is the M theory of the string theorists.  This theory, being the latest attempt at the Grand Field Theory of physics, will, when created, be the scientific story of all things.  It is the scientific attempt, I believe, to give conceptual form to Baha’u’llah statement that the “world’s equilibrium hath been upset through the vibrating influence” of His New World Order. 

The sacred and secular, the greater spiritual Reality and its smaller dimensional “outer picture” in matter, are reconnecting making not only a holy world again but also a whole, or holy, intelligence.  But knowledge is also being reordered, as a material, empirical conceptual causality recouples with the imaginative causality preceding it.  In popular works like the movies and books What the Bleep and The Secret, both of which harken back to a mythic structure of parallel consciousness moving in opposite directions, the above and below as mirrors, we see the inroads being made by imagination and visualization into the land of concepts that marks out the final stage of secular, rational thought.  The original statements of “As Below, so Above”, the Law of Attraction, and so forth, are those of Hermes Trismegistus, author of the Emerald Tablet, messenger of Thoth of ancient Egypt, Idris of The Qur’an, and a Manifestation Whom Baha’u’llah named “the Father of Philosophy.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah:148)  But all this remembering is the rational faculty re-membering its previous manifestations and rolling them up into a single system as a prelude to a new reconfiguration of human intelligence.  We are being brought to a new kind of knowing, the spiritual, crossing on the Sirat of a new understanding.  The Master wrote: ‎”The sciences of today are bridges to reality; if then they lead not to reality, naught remains but fruitless illusion.” (Selections from the Writings of Abdu’l-Baha: 110)

Because we are entering a new manifest state of humanity, the spiritual state, I believe that an entire epistemic order has come to an end and that a new one is being spread out in its stead. But that is characteristic of perceiving in the Valley of Unity where the end and the beginning are one, because the end is the beginning transformed.

Nearly forty years ago, progressive educator Stanwood Cobb wrote: “What is now needed is a scientific study of spiritual laws and values, so supported by evidence as to be beyond denial.” (Thoughts on Education and Life: 15)   And: “In addition to the material sciences, we shall need to teach the Sciences of Spirit.  What is this Science of Spirit?  That is for future man to ascertain and fervently apply to all life upon this planet.” (Ibid. p.55)   Before him Rudolf Steiner, founder of Anthroposophy and the Waldorf schools called for the birth of spiritual sciences. The mathematician Nikola Tesla remarked: “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”  We have arrived at that day, according to the famous neuro-scientist Karl Pribram, who stated: “For the first time in three hundred years science is admitting spiritual values into its exploration.” All these statements point to a new regime of knowledge, the spiritual, without saying what it is.  I don’t know either, but I believe that I know where to start mining them.  Baha’u’llah wrote: “Unveiled and unconcealed, this Wronged One hath, at all times, proclaimed before the face of all the peoples of the world that which will serve as the key for unlocking the doors of sciences, of arts, of knowledge, of well-being, of prosperity and wealth.” (Tablets of Baha'u'llah: 96)

Notice that He says that he has proclaimed that “which will serve as the key for unlocking the doors of sciences, of arts, of knowledge, of well-being, of prosperity and wealth.”  That’s a staggering claim, yet we should not lightly dismiss it because we don’t see how it can be true, according to scientific epistemology.  I mean that there’s no place in the scientific way of knowing for quantifying the possibility of future knowledge, so scientists often can’t see how anyone else can know that, either. It’s simply impossible to the scientific epistemology. To them it smacks of arrogance because, again, their ways of knowing are incapable of producing that kind of specificity.  It has to be an overstatement.  Yet those who feel this way are themselves locked into that union of ignorance and arrogance that so often overtakes the practitioners of science.  Only a humble posture of learning can open one to the possibility of new knowledge.  So let’s look a little more closely at Baha’u’llah’s statement.

A direct link to my book, Renewing the Sacred is http://tinyurl.com/cndew5a It is now also in Kindle

Modernity is Antiquity

While perusing some works of Einstein, Minkowski, Mach, the Russian professor Umov and others, I came to notice certain coincidences, more or less unexpected. Namely, when these scientists tried to transform their abstract formulae in to more concrete combinations of psychical facts the material preferred by them closely resembled some shamanistic stories and descriptions that are spread among primitive peoples in Asia and America. In a way one could possibly say that the ideas of modern physics about space and time, when clothed with concrete psychical form, appeared as shamanistic.

(Waldemar Bogoras, Ideas of Space and Time in Primitive Religion)

The fifth post of my talk The Disorder of Knowledge and the Reconfiguration of Human Intelligence

But the full process of retrieval and reintegration goes back to the earliest mythical foundations of human thought, perhaps because myth is closer to the sacred and spiritual, and it is the spiritual and sacred that everyone is so thirsty for, though they will scarcely admit it.  Here we especially note the work of Eliade, Cassirer, Levi-Strauss, Joseph Campbell, Kerenyi, and others in comparative myth, and the efforts of various literary critics like Northrop Frye to establish a general grammar of the imagination founded upon literary and psychological patterns and archetypes drawn from the world’s imaginative literature, especially the myths, folk-tales, poetry and scripture.  This is the rolling up into one structure of the long historical shift from mythos to logos, from image to word, from the language of the heart to that of the mind, from holistic thoughts to sequential ones.    

Among these revivals I want to focus upon what may be the most significant one.  I mean the revival of alchemy to find precursors to modern physical science.  Somewhat paradoxically, however, to link the pre-scientific with the scientific effects both a ghostly continuity and marks off a clear discontinuity in thought.  Regarding this double result, we can say that when old Alchemy and new Science come together and are united, a B and E fusion occurs, so that knowledge is one.  At the same time new divisions are discovered or asserted.  Dean Radin, for example, states: “One view of the evolutionary trend is that physics is returning to the holistic assumptions of the magical era.  But there is an important difference.  The post-modern view no longer lacks the explanatory power of the first era.” (Entangled Minds: 244)  Of course Radin shows his bias in that he believes only concepts, physical theories and empirical verification by the senses--he belives in efficient causality not formal causality--are considered explanatory, which is a modernist conceit, but the basic thought is correct.

Physicist Scott Tyson writes: “Though incomplete, the philosophy of the Greek philosophers and the scientific understandings of the nature of matter of the twentieth century are quite similar in many regards.” (The Unobservable Universe. p. 104) Another eminent scientist, Dr. Robert Becker, nominated twice for the Nobel Prize, has written that: “Medicine has come full circle, from the mysterious energies of the shaman-healer to the scientific understanding of the life energies of the body and their relationship to the energies of the environment.  This scientific revolution has simultaneously enriched the concepts of technological medicine and supported the ideas of energy medicine. What is emerging is a new paradigm of life, energy and medicine.” (Cross Currents. p. 81)

Books like Sacred Science: The King of Pharaonic Theocracy by R. A. Schwaller de Lubicz about the “science” of ancient Egypt, and Symbols of Sacred Science by the philosopher Rene Guenon, stress the symbology of the ancient world as a lost mode of thought that remains useful for today.  The restoration of the divine dimension of things, so close in myth because myth was at the beginning of our intellectual development, is done in part by lifting the divine out of the basement of the unconscious where it was banished in order to regain a ternary structure of true symbology, i.e. the metaphorical union of three realms in mutual interaction with the divine reinstated at the top, human in the middle, and nature at the bottom. 

Philosophically, myth and science can not really be fused because they hold different world-views, and use different mental faculties to grasp the world.  Myth is not conceptual philosophy, but imagination and art.  Yet the gap closes whenever we perceive them as structures or lattices of metaphor.  Myth presents the creation as alive, every thing in it is a presence, is part of a vast, complex order of living things that obeys the laws of magic, and human beings have a deep inner relationship with every part of it.  Science sees the universe as composed of inorganic and organic substances, obeying impersonal mathematical laws, and with which we can only have observer/observed, or even, exploiter/exploited relations of alienation and objectification.  It is indifferent to us and we are interested in it only to the extent that we can get something from it.  Yet, when separation and alienation become unbearable the mind automatically goes integrative and mythic, and a good deal of modern physics is sounding more and more like ancient myth, as the lead quote from Anthropologist Waldemar Bogoras indicates. 

I mean that today in the same mental “space” where demons and goblins cursed and snarled, and fairies and sprites played and danced, where magicians strove with witches within an imaginative field of thought, and humans painted their magic on cave walls, now in an overlaying conceptual field,  there are holographic models, quantum events, implicate and explicate orders, and whole clans of interacting “particles” with oddly tribal-sounding names like photons, leptons, muons, bosons, gluons, and hadrons,  populating the sub-atomic landscape we are trying to find our way around in scientifically and know the nature of experimentally.  This picture of one regime of knowing laying over another and older one is an archeological metaphor, one used to great effect by Foucault in his The Archeology of Knowledge.  But we can also say that myth was the science of the ancient world and science is the myths of today.

Besides these differences in the content of the universe, e.g. flame-belching dragons vs. flame-throwing rockets, there are two other differences between the mythic and scientific world-views.   The first difference lies in their respective assumptions made about the nature of the relationship between mind and matter.  It revolves around the question: which is primary?  All myth and spiritual philosophy assumes that Mind is primary cause and material creation is both effect and powerful secondary cause, while the materialist, and scientists in general, faithful to the opposite causality initiated by Cartesian thought, assume the existence of mind as effect of biological or chemical interactions which can, in turn, slightly affect matter.  At best, the materialist sees the reflection of Mind in the mirror of creation, but says it comes out of creation, because that’s where he first sees it.  So, for him, creation is the Creator.  The truth is the relation between Mind and matter is an inter-relation, a double-reflection, Mind reflected in creation and then reflected by creation back to Itself, Mind.  This is the glorious structure of the interaction of the “active force and that which is its recipient” where “these two are the same yet they are different.”  A unified perception says that Reality and its image are both existent, and one does not change without changing the other. 

Old Foundations Renewed

The highest essence and most perfect expression of whatsoever the peoples of old have either said or written hath, through this most potent been sent down from the heaven of the Will of the All-Possessing, the Ever-Abiding God.

(Gleanings from the Writings of Baha’u’llah: 95) 

Post Four of the talk: The Disorder of Knowledge and the Reconfiguration of Human Intelligence.

The implications for this are great.  As the document, Who is Writing the Future?, puts it, with the revolutions in physics early in the twentieth century: “A new door had suddenly opened into the study of both the minute constituents of the universe and its large cosmological systems, a change whose effects went far beyond physics, shaking the very foundations of a world view that had dominated scientific thinking for centuries. Gone forever were the images of a mechanical universe run like a clock and a presumed separation between observer and observed, between mind and matter.  Against the background of the far-reaching studies thus made possible, theoretical science now begins to address the possibility that purpose and intelligence are indeed intrinsic to the nature and operation of the universe.” (Bahá’í International Community: Who is Writing the Future?)  Another scientist, Sir James Jeans wrote back in the 1930’s: “The stream of knowledge is heading towards a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears to be an accidental intruder into the realm of matter... we ought rather hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter.” (Sir James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe. p. 137)

Following these investigations of the early twentieth century psychology and physics, a whole shelf of books is appearing with titles such as The Tao of Physics and Science and the Akashic Field, The God Theory, Why God Won’t Go Away.  But spirit remains for many a kind of second order material investigation, because spirit is conceived as an epiphenomenon of material processes.  Thus, sub-atomic physics pursues the God particle, biologists search for the God gene in our DNA, and psychology looks for a God spot in the brain.  Concurrent with the investigations of the physicists into the basement floor of the universe, scientific investigation in biology believes it finds empirical evidence for faith, belief and higher spirituality in the genes, nervous systems, brain chemistry, neurons of the cell, and so on, investigating this thing called consciousness in meditation studies, in theories of transcendence, alternative states of awareness induces by psychedelic drugs or in everyday experience.  It is a bustling enterprise. 

Most scientists are looking in these places for god because most scientists are materialists, not necessarily in their moral values but in their epistemological ones, and this is the only place that science could find god.  But all that this burrowing into Nature will discover is the face of man looking back at himself.  It is the actions of a crippled and myopic supreme talisman exploring but the ground surface of the mine rich in gems of inestimable value: the “puny form” of a gigantic being in which the universe is enfolded, but who is lamentably defective in self-understanding.   Still many are now and have been aware for sometime that something is afoot.  For example, Yeats wrote his poem, The Second Coming, just after World War  I:  

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    

Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

    

The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

As Yeats poem indicates another place where the modern mind is looking to find renewed inspiration is in the ancient myths and philosophies, to all past expressions of human intelligence, such as alchemy and symbolic thought, to try and uncover how chaos got turned into cosmos. 

The retrieving of all past knowledge is the effort to bring back the entire six-thousand year regime of knowing, re-presenting the thought forms and epistemological patterns characteristic of the stages of mental growth of the past sixty centuries—the knowledge of all that hath been. (Baha'u'llah, Epistle to the Son of the Wolf: 11)   Hence this retrieving is not really adding another level of knowledge, but rather building a framework to understand ourselves, a comprehending within a single representational form of what is now seen as a whole tradition whose lineaments stretch from the misty dawn of human intellection to the majestic conceptual mansions of today.  This is necessary to do in order to sum up in some kind of judgment the contributions of those centuries and ages to the advance of human civilization and development.  It is a rolling up of one order so that a new one may be spread out in its stead. 

In this spirit of synoptic overview of centuries to perceive progression we can see, in the early part of this long epoch, how a religious historical vision such as that of twelfth-century mystic Joachim of Flora gives way to the more secular sixteenth-century vision of Giambattista Vico’s New Science. In our own time, the great synthetic histories produced by minds like Marx, Spengler, Toynbee, Sorokin and Voegelin, and developmental philosophies like Hegel’s Absolute Spirit moving through moments or forms of consciousness appear.   These thinkers employ a whole battalion of terms like ages, periods, stages, eras, epochs, and cycles, and organize human history into some overarching, tri-part division, such as ancient, medieval and modern, to indicate human development, as I am doing in this paper with sensori-motor, intellectual and spiritual knowing.  These frames and schemes are put forth now because humanity is jostling against the edge, the end, some final limit, of one kind of history, and it is time to judge and make some narrative sense of it, to turn this sequence into a structure and context: to remove the anxiety of the abyss and see that all this past activity was somehow meaningful because it was leading to something.  Reflection is required at the end of any life.  But anarchy and destruction is also present.  

Hence, from the nineteenth century onwards, with Nietzsche’s Ubermench, through works like T.S Eliot’s Waste Land  and Fukuyama’s End of History,  the other story, that of the anarchy and frenetic and confused desperation that fills the minds of political and social revolutionaries, the worship of destruction and moral nihilism, the collapse of long-standing social institutions everywhere, remark on the other half of this dual process of the disintegration of one order and the integration of another, the first happening because of the second.  Hence the House of Justice could write in 1979: “The decline of religious and moral restraints has unleashed a fury of chaos and confusion that already bears the signs of universal anarchy.” (The Universal House of Justice, Ridvan 136, 1979, p. 1)

Mind Over Matter

The time has come to realize that an interpretation of the universe—even a positivist one—remains unsatisfying unless it covers the interior as well as the exterior of things; mind as well as matter.

(Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, p. 35-36)  

The third in a series of posts presenting The Disorder of Knowledge and the Reconfiguration of Human Intelligence

Foucault also saw the emergence of a new positivist episteme in the 16-18^th centuries. (See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things.)  The French Revolution spawned the social sciences in that it introduced the concept of public sovereignty, replacing “subjects” with “citizens”.  That is, Man as a subject within his own philosophical and political knowledge, no longer moving between a two-tiered vertical medieval political theology linking heaven and earth, but horizontally chugging, like a locomotive, along a modern, linear and secular track into the future. (See Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies.)

By the 19^th century man further objectified, almost mummified, himself as a scientific object securely entombed within his own empirical rationalism.  With this change man contorted himself into an idol, a Blakean “emanation.”  Like Alice he went through the looking glass of his own thought, and to the extent that he worships himself he is an idolater, like Narcissus falling in love with his own reflection.  But this crabbed distortion is but a drunk’s illusion of himself from which he must be dis-illusioned if he is to awaken back to sober reality.   This first ugly distortion spawned in reaction an equally grotesque distortion, namely, the imperial self, the great idol of the modern temper of cultural libertinism that believes that he comes out of himself, that he has broken through or seeks to break through all limitations to breathe the clear, crisp air breathed before only by the gods.  His anarchy of personal experience and extreme moral relativism is, perhaps, the horrific conclusion of the once proud Protestant revolt, with its rise of the individual interpretation of the Word of God, against the oppressive communal moral authority of the Catholic Church.  Now, in a supremely ironic twist, in a world supposedly without taboos the only taboo left is God Himself.  For, to this almighty self any higher power reminds him of limitations, authority, and that something greater than numero uno exists. 

In historiography, Meyer Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism, following scholarly studies such as Carl Becker’s The Heavenly City of the 18^th-century Philosophers, saw the gradual and complete substitution up through the nineteenth-century of natural contexts for supernatural ones to describe human progress: that is, denying religion even as one uses the premises of religion as a precondition for one’s own reasoning: a process of eating the fruit but denying the seed it came from.   Abrams wrote: “It is a historical commonplace that the course of western thought since the renaissance has been one of progressive secularization, but it is easy to mistake the way in which that process took place.  Secular thinkers have no more been able to work free of the centuries-old Judeo-Christian culture than Christian theologians were able to work free of their inheritance of classical and pagan thought.  The process—outside of the exact sciences at any rate—has not been the deletion and replacement of religious ideas but rather the assimilation and reinterpretation of religious ideas, as constitutive elements in a world view founded on secular premises.  Much of what distinguishes writers I call ‘Romantic’ derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within a prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transactions with nature.” (Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism:13)  During these centuries, among the learned class religion lost entirely its transcendent foundation to become a purely phenomenal thing, a field for sociological and psychological—more often than not psychopathological—inquiry, simply one among a number of cultural products.    

After the dissociations and narrowing of intellectual vision in all fields just noted, the philosophies and sciences of the 19^th and 20^th centuries in the west were avowedly reductionist, mechanical, and objectivist: in short, materialist.  Whatever advantages accrued from this laser-like focus on the material, and there are many, these knowledges present a deformed understanding of both the universe and human nature.  They proceed by dividing the inner from the outer and then denying the validity of the inner on strictly empirical grounds, thereby reducing spirituality and consciousness to some effluvia of material or neuronal processes.  One result of this is that modern man has lost to a great extent the capacity to have faith in anything that cannot be proven by the methods of the natural sciences.  But science stops at the point where talk goes to entities not made by natural processes and this reveals the limitations of its virtues.  For, if we are under the domination of what material science can tell us with any degree of certainty, we live as though the spiritual part of reality doesn’t exist and consequently we lose vision: that is, we blind ourselves to what thought can perceive of invisible reality.  In that fallen state, we see man not as a holy and infinite being but as a wholly finite being, not soaring through eternity but crawling through temporality.  This loss has had dire consequences for people’s life and health.  That is, as The Book of Proverbs says: “Where there is no vision, the people perish.” (The Holy Bible, Book of Proverbs 29:18)

The centuries from the sixteenth through the nineteenth may rightly be termed the rise and spread of scientific rationalism, a stage of thought without religion, built upon a material causality, an epistemology of the senses, an reductionist empiricism called objectivity and a digital language of number, a concretizing, quantifying, and fixing of the warm living cosmos into a cold dead universe.  The material science that came out of these four hundred years is the last stage of a multi-millenial intellectual unfoldment generated by a series of increasingly powerful divine pulsations.  Science is today, as religion was yesterday, a universal mode of thought and is, therefore, ripe for transformation.

As Muhammad threw down the pagan idols in the Mosque at Mecca, so Baha’u’llah is throwing down the idols in the inner Temple of Intellect.  The human spirit cannot breathe imprisoned within matter.  Materialism is not comprehensive enough an interpretation of Reality for the living human intelligence.  Thus the scientific materialist episteme has, since early in the twentieth century, the pinnacle moment of its dominance, been giving way to a new one. 

The scientific initiative that positioned humanity within a purely physical universe and objective science was undermined from within and without.  Inwardly, just as this order of narrowly rational, materialist thought had consolidated itself triumphal over the mind, Freud discovered the irrational, anarchic, instinctual basis of thought of the unconscious individual.  Jung then dug deeper and discovered it for the race.  The ego personality was seen by Freudians to be sitting atop a boiling cauldron of impulse, repressed feelings and id desires.  Yet these irrational powers, which ordinary rationality misses, dismisses, neglects, and argues away, could be understood rationally by Jungians as archetypes, mythic structures, unconscious layers of human experience, the population of forms in the morphic field.  This perspective provided the impetus for a new, more inclusive rational psychological order, bringing psychology at least to the very brink of the spiritual.  But, except for a few courageous practitioners, with no felt need to leap over the abyss of unbelief into that land so long as they wanted to call psychology a science like other sciences, psychologists dug in their heels and, braying like frightened mules, retreated, to call spirit nothing but human projection, a vestige of childhood wish-fulfillment dreams.

   Parallel to these developments in psychology has been the shattering of the homogenous Newtonian universe by theories beginning with Relativity through Quantum physics and now String Theory.  Both physics and psychology found states of pure potentiality waiting to be formed into actuality by an observer.  Physics began exploring the foundations of matter, which seemed to consist, materially, in the anarchic collision of a whole galaxy of sub-atomic particles.  But driving even deeper, often with the help of insights from psychology, empirical investigation of the deepest layer of the physical universe arrives at the same kind of intelligent foundation as exists in human psychology, and their fusion into complementary discoveries means their essence is the same and they are actually twin manifestations of it on the same plane.  Science acknowledges that something intelligent is, indeed, out there!  And if the spiritual is everywhere at once, then what is “out there” might be essentially the same thing as what is “in here”.

A direct link to my book, Renewing the Sacred is http://tinyurl.com/cndew5a It is now also in Kindle