Our Quest for Oneness

Despite the fact that so much of religion tends to divide and antagonize (including terrorize), I’ve been exploring its essential function as a unifying force in human culture. We take as our starting point the root meaning of the word “religion” itself, deriving from the Latin religare, to link back or reconnect. Whatever distortions or corruptions it has taken on over the centuries, it seems to me that we should check these against the deeper or original intention of religion before we simply reject it out of hand as obsolete, oppressive, and dangerous.

As with everything cultural, religion emerged and evolved over time according to the developmental needs, crises, and opportunities of our species. Stone Age religion certainly looked different from anything we can observe today, though perhaps some strong family resemblance continues in present-day aboriginal societies that still live in close communion with “wild” nature. I’ve promoted a theory which interprets this development of religion as correlated with three centers of consciousness (or mental locations) that open up in sequence and steadily add to our general picture of what is real and what really matters.

Triune 1The names of these three centers of consciousness employ familiar terms (body, ego, soul), but with important adjustments from the way they are popularly understood. A primary polarity is represented in body and soul, which simply identify the two directional orientations of human awareness: outward to the sensory-physical realm (body) and inward to the intuitive-mystical realm (soul). These are not “parts of the self” but rather mental locations that open awareness to distinct dimensions of experience.

A popular confusion draws an equation between soul and ego, my third mental location. But in fact ego and soul are not two names for the same thing. Soul, once again, refers to our inward orientation and deep inner life, while ego is our socially constructed center of identity. While I admit that an established center of identity (ego = I) is what makes our primary split in orientation possible in the first place, ego actually inhabits its own realm: the socio-moral arena of life in our tribe.

In the above illustration, the primary polarity of body and soul is indicated by a green connector while ego sits on its own. This makes the point that ego is a construct of culture, both a product and symptom of society, which makes it the wild card in our evolutionary adventure. More on that below.Triune 2

Religion is thus designed to coordinate these three centers of consciousness (body, soul, ego) and their corresponding realms. Together these centers comprise the animal, spiritual, and personal aspects of a human being. Our development, as individuals and a species, advances sequentially through stages beginning in the body, moving through an ego-dominant period, and deepening all the while into a more inwardly grounded mode of being.

I have designated these general stages of religion as animistic (body-centered), theistic (ego-centered), and post-theistic (soul-centered). Just because development has advanced beyond a stage doesn’t mean that the experiences and concerns peculiar to that stage are no longer relevant. On the contrary, those experiences and concerns are taken up and incorporated into the next stage and updated according to its emergent paradigm of meaning.

As the wild card in the set, ego represents a strong element of risk against the eventual fulfillment of this project. In previous posts I have tried to describe the factors that tend to compromise what psychology rightly names “ego strength” – the well-centered self confidence that develops as our needs for safety, love, power and worth are adequately met.

In the best of all possible worlds, we grow up in a family environment where these needs are fulfilled and our personal identity (ego) is securely established. Of course, we don’t live in the best of all possible worlds and our caretakers are not perfect. As a consequence, the ego adapts and compensates for the insecurity by defending itself, pretending to be what it’s not, and insisting on being the center of reality. Interestingly, but not really surprisingly, theism – as the model of religion that co-evolves with the ego – often portrays its principal deity in corresponding ways, as craving glory, jealous of rivals, and prone to violence in his campaign for supremacy.

Since in previous posts I’ve deconstructed the perverse influence of ego insecurity on the otherwise respectable and developmentally necessary stage of theism, I want to move now in a completely opposite direction with my analysis. It’s easy to commit the mistake of effectively dismissing theism as only a transitional stage (more like a phase) along our way to something better. From my comments on the ego, about the inevitable and worldwide neuroses that pull theism into various dangerous corruptions (sectarianism, exclusionary membership, extremism, and redemptive violence), you might assume I have nothing good to say about either one of them.

On the contrary.

Triune FullThe diagram above shows where theism fits into the evolutionary scheme of religion. Our animal nature of the body connects us (religare) outwardly to the sensory-physical Universe, while our spiritual nature (or what I prefer to call our higher self) links us inwardly to the intuitive-mystical Ground. Both “Universe” and “Ground” are synonyms of sort, each communicating the idea of oneness: Universe as the nuance of totality (the All), and Ground as essence. As I said earlier, this body-soul axis forms the primary polarity in which human beings live. Ego (our wild card variable) tugs development in a horizontal direction, where we find a third nuance of oneness, encountered as the Other.

This, I would say, is the real genius in theism: regarding the present mystery of reality in its specific incarnation as one who stands opposite of me, in a space of absolute difference insofar as the other is deep-down unique and truly an individual (from individuum, the indivisible). In the process of ego development, identity is shaped and challenged in relationship with others who come out to meet us from the dark recess of otherness. We’re not talking about the role-plays of social performance that govern so much of our daily interaction, but about the direct encounter between one self and another.

To conceive of God as Other in this sense, as a transcendent and absolute self who comes out to meet us or calls us out of our selves to an encounter, considers the present mystery of reality in terms of a one-to-one relationship. As the Jewish writer Martin Buber explained in his seminal book I and Thou, this faith in reality as arising out of the primal relationship of self and Other frames our whole existence in the dynamics of mutuality, dialogue, estrangement, and reconciliation.

This might encourage us to re-read our Bible as a mythological exploration (of quest, encounter, and response) into reality as the reciprocal adventure of humanity’s longing for God and God’s outreach to humanity. To simply take the Bible literally and make God into a literal being (i.e., a god) only serves to strip out its internal complexity, leaving nothing more than supposedly factual reports of supernatural events and once-upon-a-time miracles. When this happens, the Bible becomes, in the words of Francis Bacon, “an idol of the tribe.” It stops speaking and becomes only words.

What if instead we engaged the Bible as a literary portrait – really a collection of portraits – of the human being as formed in relationship with Holy Otherness, as falling out of union and trying to hide our nakedness from The Gaze, as distracting ourselves in mediocrity or striving for superiority, and at last hearing the call to an awakened life and returning to intimacy with The One who never left us? That would be a very different Bible from the one pumped from most pulpits today, would it not?

As I said at the beginning, our developmental advance from one mental location (and one stage of religion) to the next doesn’t mean that we grow up and get past those deeper needs and concerns. Just as theism doesn’t (or shouldn’t) seek to discredit the animist vision of reality as it sets out to expand on the dynamics of relationship, neither does (or should) post-theism dismiss the genuine insight of I and Thou at the heart of theism as it cultivates a more contemplative engagement with the grounding mystery of Being itself.

Our quest for oneness at each stage turns out to be a chapter (and ongoing theme) in the longer human journey to communion. Whether we celebrate our place in the living Universe, reach out with care to the holy Other, or sink inward to the nameless Ground of our being, we are fulfilling a most enduring and sacred of human quests.

Lost in The Message

Present Mystery FullWhat’s your message? What philosophy of life – theories, beliefs, values, and aims – do you live by? Each of us has a message, a personalized interpretation of what life is about, what really matters. Some of us are more consistent in the way we put our philosophy of life into practice, and some philosophies of life are more thoughtfully composed than others. But we all have one – or I should say, each of us has one, which means that all of us taken together represent billions of different messages concerning the nature of reality, the purpose of existence, the meaning of life, and how we ought to live.

If we shift focus from individuals to societies, we can see that entire groups of people are characterized by the messages of their respective traditions. There’s a Christian message and a Buddhist message, and inside each we will find variations on the principal message: Roman Catholic, Baptist, Evangelical or Progressive Christian; Mahayana, Theravada, Zen or Pure Land Buddhist. These group-level distinctions are more numerous than you might first expect, and the variations on a message will multiply exponentially the deeper we look, until, once again, we find ourselves face-to-face with this individual Christian or that individual Buddhist (or whatever brand of message we happen to be considering).

Any message (at whatever level) can only speak out of the range of experiences informing it. No human being can hold everything inside his or her frame of reference, and even when we adopt someone else’s message into our own, we are unable to escape the limitations inherent to just having a perspective. Some cultural messages, like the religions mentioned a moment ago, claim that their perspective on reality was revealed to them by someone who did (or does) in fact comprehend everything in a limitless perspective, which is a contradiction supernaturally transcended in this case.

But you have only to study it in closer detail to discover that their so-called revealed message carries assumptions about the universe that are millenniums out of date, along with ethical values and directives that today many regard as barbaric at best. Even if their message once had the mystique of encompassing all of reality, it’s obvious now that it cannot – and didn’t back then, either.

So all of us carry messages that articulate a philosophy of life, conclusions and conjectures that orient us meaningfully in reality. My message is not exactly the same as yours by virtue of our different backgrounds, histories, situations and personalities (to use very broad categories). And neither of us holds the same philosophy of life today as we did, say, ten years ago. The slow process of maturity changes us, and along the way we come upon opportunities, suffer losses, and learn things that our former self could not have imagined or wished for.Present Mystery 3So many messages, so many different philosophies of life might inspire a more thoughtful exploration of meaning, if only we could get past the outer orbit where we all are promoting our messages as the best or only right one. But let’s say for now that we can. If there are so many variants in how human beings interpret reality and make sense of things, what can be said about the nature of meaning itself? If you have yours and I have mine, then at least we should be able to agree that meaning is more complex than our divergent messages would have us believe.

Indeed, the “meaning of life” that each of us is busy constructing is incapable of being reduced to a publishable message. There is just too much information, too many angles and perspectives, too many different ways of arranging and connecting the countless points of human experience, to break it all down into a single exhaustive philosophy of life. If we can step deeper into the complexity of what we might dare call THE human experience, we have to be willing to leave behind the either/or logic of competing messages and develop a tolerance for paradox.

It is possible that your message and mine are two legitimate spins on the meaning of life, constructed out of two distinct vantage points on the present mystery of reality and generated out of experiences that are deep-down unique according to the specific conditions that make us two different individuals. Our competing messages or philosophies of life may be irreconcilable, but perhaps all our efforts at negotiating a total agreement or eliminating our competition are fundamentally misguided. We are finally coming to understand that our ambition for one supreme and absolute message will most likely lead to our collective extinction.

Meaning, then, has to do with the haphazard and more intentionally systematic ways that human beings select from the moving stream of experience those sensations, impressions, and patterns that correspond to the apparatus of our nature as sentient beings. We “tune into” reality along frequencies matching our human needs for safety, nourishment, intimacy, identity, freedom, purpose and significance. It’s that last (and highest) need, for significance, which drives our incessant activity of meaning-making: constructing a “world” and composing a philosophy of life (our message) that will orient us meaningfully in reality.Present Mystery 2The construction of meaning begins in the act of reflecting on experience and forming a mental image that depicts it internally to the mind. As we would expect, the images which first ascend into consciousness are generated out of the primary experiences of being in the provident garden of our mother’s womb, falling out of union and pressed through a narrow passage into exile, thereafter compelled by the pang of need to find the sustenance, protection, and warm bonds of security that will ensure our survival.

The entire drama of birth is preserved in this way, as powerful archetypal impressions coded into our subconscious memory. These reflex images continue to serve as primal templates for what concerns us existentially as human beings; they are foundation for everything else we construct “higher up” in the configuration of meaning called our world. (I’ll refer the reader to the work of Stanislav Grof for more on that topic.)

Because they provide this bridge from direct and spontaneous experience into the organized construction site of our world, these reflex images are known as metaphors (from meta, across + phorein, to carry). Not to be confused with the similes and analogies by which we compare and make sense of things we know in other ways, metaphors operate as grounding for language, anchors that tie our otherwise free-floating world systems to the present mystery of reality. When they are engaged (typically at deep intuitive levels), these images draw consciousness down to its source. Rather than representing something (some thing) external to the mind, an archetypal metaphor is a “dark depiction” of our own essential ground.

And what is this ground exactly? We can’t say, for the simple reason that its reality as the ground of being is deeper than words can reach. Once the threshold between meaning and mystery is crossed, in the direct and spontaneous experience of reality, we leave meaning behind and enter the ineffable presence of being-in-the-moment. Not a being, but being-itself.Present Mystery 1This is where everything begins – not in the once-upon-a-time sense of begin, but as the timeless source of your existence in each moment. The present mystery of reality, which might also be named the Real Presence of Mystery, is evident all around you in its countless manifestations. As one of these manifestations of the present mystery, you also have the opportunity to descend through the interior of your own being, into deeper and deeper registers of contemplative experience until, releasing the last (which were really the first) forms of self-definition, awareness breaks through to … this.

We can review the long history of religion as the pouring-forth of mystery into meaning, and meaning into the numerous messages or philosophies of life encircling our planet today. With so many parties and denominations calling at us to join in agreement and have a seat in the sanctuary, more people than ever before are feeling lost in the message. So much of it leaves us baffled, but also slightly offended at the demand that we distrust ourselves and let someone else do our thinking for us.

More people now than ever are seeking to push through the mob of placards and pickets, ready even to drop their own heart-crossed creeds in the quest for a deeper truth. Because they are straining against the outflow of world construction that’s been going on for many generations, the effort and intention of these seekers is interpreted by the custodians of orthodoxy as defiance, disobedience, and rebellion. But they are not interested in anarchy. They aren’t promoting atheism or dabbling in New Age superstitions.

What they seek is Real Presence – in themselves, in their relationships and communities, in the way they live on the earth. For all I know, you may be one of them.

Post-Theism and the Great Work of Religion

The progress of religion towards post-theism has its critics on either side, with devoted theists decrying it as just another form of atheism, and atheists voicing their suspicion that it’s taking us backwards into superstition and tribalism when we need to be moving forward into the enlightenment of science and technology. Theists are sure that the “post” in post-theism is motivated out of a desire to get rid of god, to get past our need for what god represents and provides. On the other side, atheists hear “theism” in post-theism and are convinced that it’s nothing more than a postmodern reconstruction of the same old neurosis.

But the “post” and “theism” in post-theism are misunderstood in each case. In fact, post-theism represents the direction religion must go – indeed it’s the direction that religion is already going, despite the slide at its margins into the corruptions of complacency and terrorism. You might be surprised to learn that you are a post-theist, but I make no presumptions.

Animist_TheistReligion began in the body, where the visceral urgencies of our animal life resonate with and link into (religare means to connect) the rhythms of nature. Earliest religion was animistic, preoccupied with the provident support of reality and the life-force that ebbs and flows along the rhythmic cycles of natural time. The pressing concern was to live in accord with these cycles, to flourish in the fertile grooves of dependency and to celebrate the mystery, both tremendous and fascinating (Rudolph Otto’s mysterium tremendum et fascinans), in which we exist.

There were no “gods” as yet, no external causes or agencies behind the forces impinging on us. The thunderstorm, for instance, wasn’t regarded as controlled or sent by some supervising intelligence separate from the storm. Rather the thunderstorm was itself the violent and refreshing expression of life-force. Its power manifested a vital energy and aroused sympathetic vibrations in our nervous system.

As time went on and the smaller family clans of our early human ancestors grew larger and more socially complex, this new cultural environment of the tribe gradually eclipsed a direct relationship with nature. In order for the individual to become a compliant member of the group, animal urgencies of the body had to be “trained” into morally acceptable behavior as befit the tribal order. The social construction of identity thus domesticated our animal nature and installed a deputy manager in the ego, with the authority of executive management retained by the tribe.

It was probably the question of “who’s in charge” – as key to the smooth operation of social roles and duties – that first inspired a reconsideration of nature as managed by external agencies, giving rise to the notion of deities as supervising directors behind what is happening around us. Conceiving a sovereign intelligence “on the other side” of our limiting conditions transformed the human-nature relationship into an exchange of services. As human devotees offered their prayers, worship, and sacrifices to a patron deity, it was hoped that the deity would in turn grant success in childbirth, a bountiful harvest, victory over an enemy, comfort in suffering, beatitude in the next life, or whatever boon was under the deity’s control and discretion.

Theist_AtheistSomewhere along the line, someone called “B.S.” and the game changed. The denial of (a) god’s existence might have been a simple refusal to accept the reality of something unavailable to direct experience. It may have come as science was starting to penetrate the veil of what’s really behind the phenomena of nature. Or perhaps it was provoked by the confrontation of a divine will and humane values, as ethical defiance of a deity’s demand for child sacrifice, for instance. Then again, our First Atheist may have simply been unable, with intellectual integrity, to accept the popular personification or orthodox theory of god.

The moment someone publicly said “No” to (this or that idea of) god, theism became an option and people had to choose between believing or not believing – that is, between taking the traditional myths and doctrines literally, or dismissing them as bunk and balderdash. Due to the morally charged nature of the tribe, and of the individual’s identity as a member of the tribe, this polarity of options quickly collapsed into a conflict of opposing views. Inevitably, it seems, theists and atheists are compelled by force of their differing convictions into dogmatic positions, each refusing to listen to the other and both fantasizing a world where the other no longer exists.

The rise of post-theism begins right here, in the tension generated between the poles of theism and atheism. It’s important to understand that post-theism is not merely a marketing makeover of theism, nor is it a postmodern restatement of atheism. And even though the dogmatists on both sides cannot (will not) acknowledge post-theism as a viable “third option,” there is a growing number of both theists and atheists who are creatively promoting its advance. This is because more contemporary thinking individuals are coming around to the realization that, one way or the other, we really just don’t know.

AgnosticBetween the dogmatic positions on either side of the theist-atheist debate, a significant population of truth-seekers around the planet and across cultures are finding space to breathe, as they acknowledge that the grounding mystery of being, which the myths and metaphors of religion attempt to name, is beyond language and the grasp of our minds. To say that it does or doesn’t exist in the guise of one deity or another is to miss the real insight of this agnostic confession. The point is that all our attempts to talk about it, as part of an effort to prove or disprove its objective existence, move us out and away from the very truth we are contemplating.

Post-theism begins, then, as theists and atheists alike humbly admit that the Real Presence of mystery (or the present mystery of reality, including, of course, the reality of our own existence) is ineffable – incapable of being described in words or reduced to meaning. Any honest thinking person cannot dismiss the awareness that language and the meaning we construct only qualifies this mystery, but will never contain it. For that reason we must renounce the tendency in ourselves towards dogmatism, and leave open a “space” in our belief systems for a deep, silent wonder.

Fighting over the existence of god is thus a contest over meaning that gets us no closer to the grounding mystery and provident uplift of life in this moment. Whether theist or atheist, each of us needs to descend through that open space and ponder the umbilical opening where meaning crystallizes and dissolves again into the mystery. Obviously this requires us to be sufficiently centered and self-aware, as well as contemplatively engaged in the moment. If you and I can both speak out of that agnostic space of not-knowing, offering our perspectives and beliefs in a spirit of humility, the Great Work of religion can proceed.

DialogicalThe theist-atheist debate is a win-lose contest (and all too quickly becomes a war). Dialogue, on the other hand, is this activity of sharing our perspective without a need to persuade or convince a dialogue partner to our position. We speak and listen with openness, curiosity, respect, and in a mutual understanding of the necessary incompleteness (and possible distortions) in our relative points of view. Through the back-and-forth of dialogue, meaning (logos) forms between (dia) the partners. It is no longer merely a reciprocal sharing but becomes a mutual co-creation of higher meaning.

Full ChartWith my illustration now complete, what I’m calling the “Great Work” of religion approaches fulfillment. With its commitment to keeping an open space of agnostic confession and enjoining other perspectives in healthy dialogue, post-theism takes up the responsibility of constructing shared meaning. This constructivist phase is where the providential uplift of the grounding mystery, experienced in the mystical depths of contemplative awareness, finally bears fruit in a paradoxical vision: The truth of both/and honors our differences as it energizes the ongoing pursuit of inclusive community.

                                                                                

Note: The color-code of text in my diagram corresponds to that in previous posts.

  • Black = Body, vitality, animal nature, carnal, instinct, urgency
  • Orange = Ego, identity, inner child, personal, fantasy, obedience
  • Purple = Soul, authenticity, higher self, spiritual, wisdom, responsibility

Our Creative Brain

I am fascinated with the human brain, and since I own one, I try as best I can to understand how it works. Without reducing all that I am to my brain and what goes on inside it, I nevertheless have a strong suspicion that everything I am is deeply dependent on this three-pound wonder between my ears. In reflecting further on the matrix of meaning and the myths by which we construct our worlds, I’ve come to a revelation concerning how all of this might be brain-based after all.

Web of Meaning_MatrixHere is my illustration of what I call the matrix of meaning – the crisscrossing polarities of primary concerns (orange) and narrative motifs (black) – and the web we construct on its frame as we weave the pattern known as our world. A deeper exploration of the matrix itself can be found in my post “Myth and the Matrix of Meaning” (http://wp.me/p2tkek-j2), while more about the peculiar construction of the web and its zones of meaning is in “Meaning and Paradox” (http://wp.me/p2tkek-sv). The opposition inherent to the four polarities gives the matrix its creative energy, which in turn compels this incessant human activity of meaning-making.

As I reflect on the matrix and particularly on the zones of meaning with the brain in the back of my mind (how’s that for a twist?), I begin to see how the three zones correspond to three main evolutionary divisions in our brain’s anatomy: (1) the primitive brain stem enfolded by (2) the limbic system and crowned with (3) a cerebral cortex. Each division evolved with specific responsibilities to the whole, and all of them work together for the survival, adaptation, and fulfillment of our potential as a species.

NeutralityThe brain stem (informally known as our “reptilian brain”) is responsible for the internal state and basic life-support of our body. Activities such as breathing, heartbeat, blood pressure, body temperature and the countless visceral events that must be coordinated in regulating the dynamic balance called homeostasis are monitored and adjusted from the autonomic control center of the brain stem.

Notice how the first zone of meaning, neutrality, is deeply similar to the brain stem’s preoccupation with homeostasis. Could it be that this natural balance-point in the body’s internal state is at the root of our preference for familiarity, comfort, and living on “autopilot”?

We like to stay where things are manageable, where the situational demands on our attention and effort are minimal. If we could, a part of us would prefer lounging in the warm sun as long as our animal nature is content.

Meaning-making begins, then, with our basic needs for safety, warmth, and nourishment. Once the channels of provision are flowing, it’s easy for us to stay in those grooves and succumb to the sleepy rhythm of the day-to-day.

Conflict

But as we know, we can’t stay there indefinitely. Life throws us curve balls and our automatic routines are upset. In addition to a brain stem that
works compulsively to keep us alive, humans (and all other mammals) possess a limbic system, which gives us the ability to respond emotionally to our environment.

Obviously any organism that can link up an association between an external object or event and its own internal state, so that the merest stimulus suggesting that object or event in the future elicits an anticipatory response, will have a survival advantage over an organism lacking this emotional talent.

Once again we can see a correlation between the brain and meaning-making. Emotion is equipped for life in the “conflict” zone, where the polarities in the matrix generate stress and strain. The limbic brain is also the niche in our nervous system where ego begins its career, also known as our inner child. In our quest for identity (ego = “I”) – typically most desperate and dramatic during adolescence – we are trying to figure out where we belong and how we are special.

Stories of privilege, entitlement, and superiority serve to bolster the ego and make us feel that everything revolves around “me and mine.” If the body seeks homeostasis and validates our narratives of contentment and the status quo, ego frequently instigates conflict in its ambition to be first, highest, and best. There’s no need to recount the damage done to ourselves, our relationships, and our planet as ego tries to exploit conflict in its favor, whatever the cost. I want to win, don’t you?

Paradox

The most recently evolved division of our brain is the cerebral cortex – all those billions of neurons and quadrillions of connections that carry the impulses of experience into conscious thought. At this level the brain is further organized into lobes, circuits, and nuclei specialized to process specific kinds of information coming across our senses.

Beyond this sifting-and-sorting business, however, the cortex also gives us the ability to restrain our urges and reflexes, to extract general ideas from concrete examples, to think critically and strategically, to imagine what’s possible and to transcend opposites. The farthest forward of specialized structures and last to come fully online is our prefrontal cortex, which is involved in self-control, rationality, forethought, and responsible behavior.

Another interesting feature of the cerebral cortex is its lateral division into left and right hemispheres. While the differences between the two hemispheres are commonly misrepresented in popular literature, research has revealed the left side (above and behind our left eye) as more gifted in abstraction and analysis, while the right side tends to be better with information that is concrete and intuitive. In the “conversation” between the hemispheres, conducted across a structure called the corpus callosum, our higher brain is able to reconcile opposites as paradoxes rather than have to come down on one side or the other (dualism).Zones_Brain

What we’re talking about here is our higher self, also known as the soul, which is where our adult intelligence resides. Only as we are able to move out of neutrality and rise above the conflict can we refine our appreciation for the complex nature of experience. The greatest paradox of them all – the timeless mystery within us and the turning cosmos around us – is home to the soul, the zone where we construct and celebrate ultimate meaning.

Meaning and Paradox

A while back in a post entitled Myth and the Matrix of Meaning I offered a way of understanding our personal and cultural myths (referring simply to a narrative plot, from the Greek mythos) as constructed upon a deep system of codes (matrix) which generate the concerns and motifs that preoccupy us as human beings. If our lives are to have meaning, the stories we tell and put into action must orient us meaningfully inside this matrix.

Meaning is not something we look for and find in reality, but rather something we as humans project onto reality. We spin meaning like a spider spins a web: it comes out of us, anchors to the matrix at specific points (which I’ll review in a moment), stretches across the present mystery of reality, and serves as a habitat. So the popular notion of our “search for meaning” is fundamentally mistaken. If we find meaning, it’s only because someone else put it there. Perhaps we’ve stumbled upon a floor clipping of our own or an unpublished draft we don’t remember setting aside long ago.

The belief that meaning is out there to be discovered is part of the heritage of theism, which, particularly in its monotheistic variant, promotes the myth that (a) god purposefully created the universe and made it meaning-full. Our “search for meaning,” then, is coming behind god and finding what he put there beforehand. Conceivably there is nothing that does not “have” meaning; we just need the intelligence and wisdom to discover it, or else count on some angel or ordained expert to reveal it to us. As theism loses currency these days, more and more people are having to come to terms with the responsibility of making the meaningful life they want.

The matrix of meaning consists of four primary human concerns and four narrative motifs. Each concern and motif exists in polarity with another concern or motif. Thus the concern of Security stands in opposition to that of Suffering, while Freedom stands opposite of Fate. Other creative and interesting relationships among the primary concerns are the more lateral associations of each concern with its neighbors on either side. Similarly the motifs comprise oppositions of Love and War, Work and Play. This dynamic of polarity – opposites that are connected along a continuum – gives the matrix its creative energy.

For a deeper dig into the primary concerns and narrative motifs making up the matrix, you might be interested in the post referenced earlier. At this point, however, I want to explore the composition of meaning as it is spun around, between, and across these supercharged polarities of the matrix.

Web of Meaning_MatrixFirst Zone of Meaning: Neutrality

The design of the matrix, as illustrated in the above diagram and already mentioned, is all about polarity. If we could go to the very center of all this creative opposition we would arrive at a point where each polarity is effectively neutralized, approaching a kind of perfect and non-energetic equilibrium. One set of stories that human beings weave defines a zone in the web of meaning (colored bronze in the diagram) which I will name neutrality. This is where we feel comfortable and things are “manageable” – stress and conflict are minimal, we are holding it together, and things are copacetic.

When life is fairly predictable and we know our way around, a trance state can start to set in. Living our lives doesn’t require much deliberation, as the routine pushes us along and behavior becomes automatic. Humans perhaps have a natural preference for neutrality, where the situational requirements on our active attention and focused effort are reduced and we can accomplish our daily tasks without too much mental investment.

It is also in this first zone of meaning that the more profound insights into reality picked up by sage philosophers and mystics are “dumbed down” into the platitudes and catchphrases of pop-culture. We think that repeating a fifty-cent affirmation at the beginning of each day will fill us with spiritual vitality, or that going to church will add significance to our lives. We glorify our messiahs and turn shamans into celebrities, then give them book deals and send them into early retirement.

Second Zone of Meaning: Conflict

Moving out from the center puts us deeper into the countervailing forces of polarity, where the strain of this-against-that is acutely felt. This zone of meaning (defined by a mauve strand in the web) is definitely not comfortable and our well-practiced habits of life don’t move us very effectively through the stress. Consequently it amplifies into distress, interfering with our ability to manage well, think straight, and accomplish our goals. Quite often our disturbed state will upset the status quo in our relationships, stirring up miscommunication and discord.

One short-term value of conflict is that it can focus us in an instant, which makes it a common tactic of politicians and preachers when they want to jolt their constituents and congregations out of complacency. Conflict just feels electric and alive. Occasionally we will actually seek it out as a kind of therapy for lethargy and boredom with life-as-usual. Antagonism – directing our energy in opposition to something we hate or can’t stand – can be a quick fix when irrelevance starts seeping under the floor-boards of our world. If it goes on interminably, however, we can lose hope and start looking elsewhere for purpose.

Many of us at this point (or in this zone) take steps to relieve our distress by self-medicating (with food and intoxicants), seeking help from medical or mental health professionals, or using exercise to burn off our nervous energy. If we do nothing, then our nervous system is at risk of crashing into depression. We might try a meditation technique for a while and experience some initial benefits, but it’s not long before the strain of life – or in a more existentialist vein, the “burden of existence” – turns the discipline into one more demand on our precious and shrinking resource of time.

Third Zone of Meaning: Paradox

While popular wisdom, which turns out not always so wise, calls us back from the strain of daily life into the zone of neutrality where meaning is flat and predictable once again, our real challenge at this point is to step through the strain and into the higher tension of paradox (violet strand). But whereas the tension of the second zone is merely unproductive and exhausting strain, the tension of paradox is creative. This is where a dualism such as freedom versus fate is finally understood as a proper polarity: freedom in fate, and fate in freedom.

Creativity is itself paradoxical, as a marriage of freedom and fate, chaos and order, wild energy and fixed form, raging waters and the stable riverbed. Each of the four polarities in the matrix can be appreciated in this same way (as paradox), but only as we are able to push above the neurotic dualism of everyday life strain. It’s not freedom or fate, security or suffering, love or war, play or work but all of these currents swirling together in the vibrant stream of reality.

We come to learn that our moral campaigns and utopian ideals where fate, suffering, war, and work are eradicated and the world returns to its original paradisaical state of bliss, are nothing more than fantasies – and sometimes dangerous delusions. It’s at this stage, in fact, that we become aware of our human responsibility in constructing meaning and creating the worlds we want to live in.

The present mystery of reality is transparent and opaque, random and provident, the ground of being and the abyss of extinction. And just as in quantum physics, reality will “show up” according to what we set out to prove.

                                                                               

Imagine that each of the zones in my diagram outlines a world we have constructed and inhabit. Each step outward across the web of meaning translates the tension inherent to the matrix into a larger and more complex (and also complicated) worldview.

We can choose to live small and stay where the tension is minimal, where our daily habits allow us to sleepwalk through life.

Or we might sign our allegiance to one dogmatic orthodoxy or another, drawing excitement, purpose, and hope from a crusade we believe in.

We also have the option of stepping through the veil of conflict and taking in a bigger picture, where the world (our world) is not such a simple place – for neutrality and dualism are both simplistic constructs. As our web of meaning is capable of supporting an appreciation for polarity and paradox, we can live with ever-greater fidelity to the way things really are.

Ego’s God

Post-theism, unlike atheism with which it is commonly confused, advocates for the necessity of theism in the full development of human beings. If I am critical of theism – referring to the belief in higher beings who supervise and intervene on human affairs – it is not because I think its contribution to our progress as a species is no longer needed, but that its worldview for the most part is so outdated as to render it largely irrelevant to life today. I have explored this loss of relevance in recent posts already (Religion and the Snow Cone Universe and The Three Stages of Religion), so I’ll rest my case for now.

According to the general course of religion’s evolution across the millenniums, theism occupies the middle stage between animism and post-theism, which makes it either a successful bridge or a tragic barrier to what Abraham Maslow named the “farther reaches of human nature.” When it succeeds, the personal ego can be transcended in the interest of communion, responsibility, love, and fulfillment. But when it fails in its essential function, theism locks the ego down in regressive attitudes and self-preoccupation, where “me and mine” become anchors of an insatiable consumerism, dogmatic orthodoxy, and redemptive violence.

The present failure of theism is partly due to its insistence on defending an obsolete worldview, but even more to this lockdown on the ego – on its insecurities around death and its ambition for immortality. My title for this post has a double meaning, referring on one hand to the way that god inspires and endorses an acceptable range of possibilities in the formation of individual identity (ego), as a member of this or that tribe. I consider this the essential function of theism. Obedience to the will of god, worship of god’s attributes, and conformity with the character of god as represented in the myths and testimonies of tradition, draw ego development in the direction of this ideal.

The other reading of my title is more consistent, in my opinion, with what theism today has become: Ego is god. This is where it becomes “all about me and for my sake,” where religion is reduced to the services that meet my needs and will ensure my everlasting destiny in heaven when I die. If these services and assurance were not there, ego would have no reason to stay with religion or “be religious.” Today churches compete for the attention, entertainment, satisfaction, membership, and fair-trade donations of the ego-as-god.

To understand how we got here, we need to examine more closely the process of ego formation and the forces that hold ego together. There is widespread consensus in developmental psychology that ego (referring to the individual’s separate center of identity) is not something we are born with, but must be constructed through the process known as socialization. The ego is thus a social construct and is molded, i.e., disciplined, shaped, dressed up, and acknowledged as “one of us,” an insider, a person of value and member of the tribe.Ego Dynamics On the way through this gauntlet of moral engineering, the identity under construction must negotiate two opposing values: to fit in with the group, but at the same time to stand out as an individual. It could be argued that the ego’s need to belong (fit in) precedes and is therefore deeper than its need for recognition (to stand out). But then again, the mere urgency of needing to fit in presupposes some degree of separation or exposure. So I will assume that these two opposing values arise together, forming an inherent tension (and anxiety) in the process and product of socialization known as ego.

In order to fit in and stand out, the ego must be provided with rules and expectations. Every tribe (referring here to any organized and internally engaged human population, beginning with the nuclear family) will have its conventions as to what being “one of us” must look and act like. As the individual toggles back-and-forth between belonging (but without getting buried in anonymity) and recognition (but without losing the connection of human intimacy), ego is trying on various personae or masks.

Each mask represents commitment to a role, and every role is part of a role-play, the elaboration of which is known as culture. In the early years an individual will try on a variety of masks, pretending to be a doctor or nurse, cowboy or Indian, cop or robber, grocery clerk or celebrity fashion model. Through it all, of course, is the felt pressure to be a “good boy” or “good girl” according to the morality of the tribe. Eventually certain masks will become more or less permanent identifiers, as the identity an individual settles on or is stuck with. Typically these demarcate the roles that will involve him or her in such conventional pursuits as marriage, family, and career.

Some masks and the energies they elicit are discouraged by the tribe, as perhaps not appropriate to “who we are” or to the way a good boy or girl should behave. As Carl Jung explained, these roles and their associated inclinations must then be split off and pushed out of sight, in order to ensure the individual’s acceptance by others. This split-off aspect doesn’t just fall away and disappear, however, but lurks behind the ego as its shadow – alluring, scandalous, forbidden, and dangerous. Jung theorized that our full individuation into a whole self is only possible as we are able to come to terms with our shadow and find ways of reconciling it back into our personality. Only then, after integration, balance, and stability have been achieved, can we transcend or go beyond the ego into higher transpersonal experiences.

A primary function of theism, as I’ve said, is to arrange and orient tribal life around an image of ultimate reality, personified and projected as a provident agency behind the mortal realm where we humans live and die. The deity (referring to this personified representation in myth, art, and theology) puts on display, as it were, the attributes that devotees glorify in worship and strive to obey in daily life. In this way, the moral development of culture over the millenniums has followed a trending line of ascent, from basic commitments to the primary group, through an opening-up to outsiders (strangers), and into still more enlightened practices of benevolence and forgiveness (as it concerns the enemy).Ego_Deity_DevilPost-theism urges us to continue this progression, to the point where we have fully incarnated the virtues of our deity – or to put it another way, where the projected image of our own dormant nature is finally reached and awakened in the way we live. At that point we can take up the responsibilities of loving each other, caring for the earth, and being faithful “higher powers” to the generations depending on us. They are just starting out on the adventure of ego-formation, which means that we must be creative mythmakers, wise advisors, and provident stewards of the theism that is shaping them. An important stipulation is that our representation of God (as deity) must be congruent with the cosmology that contemporary science is revealing to us.

But whereas theism might lend a bridge for the longer arc of our spiritual evolution, it is currently hung up on the ego – and hung up by the ego, in the form of deities who are calling for jihads, damning outsiders, and demanding purity over love. God’s shadow, which is the condemned and unacceptable parts of ourselves that have split off and taken metaphysical reality as the devil, is seen at work in liberal politics, in the civil rights of minorities, the decline in church membership, and in the general deviance of our youth.

In the crusade of true believers and fundamentalists against the menacing shadow of evil in the world, “the devil” is actually magnified and empowered. Violence against terrorism only intensifies aggression, just as the state-sanctioned murder of murderers only justifies more murder as a solution to our problem. The split within us thus gets played out as a split down the middle of reality, and in our campaigns to root out and destroy the shadow in our enemy, we are pushing ourselves and everything with us to the verge of extinction.

Ego is not god, but neither is God an ego. The thing that religion seems so desperate to rescue out of the world will bring about the end of the world and take us all down – unless we can wake up first.

The Three Stages of Religion

In Religion and the Snow Cone Universe I explored the essential function of religion as a way of connecting (religare, tie together) the inner and outer realms of human experience. Our mystical communion with the grounding mystery is metaphorically represented and depicted across a collection of sacred stories known as mythology. These myths (mythos, narrative plot) are recited by the community in ritual performances and worked out in daily life according to the local customs and precepts of morality.

A critically important qualification in all of this is that the mythology of religion must align with our current understanding of the cosmos. When it does, our spirituality (inner realm, grounding mystery) can flow out and connect meaningfully with our science (outer realm, cosmic order), generating an awareness that everything “turns as one” (universe). When this alignment is missing, our myths become incredible and increasingly irrelevant. Rather than being able to inhabit our stories, enacting them and living them out, we are left with the choice of taking them literally as eye-witness accounts of supernatural and miraculous events of the past or tossing them aside as so much childish superstition.

All of that is looking at religion as positioned at the center of a vertical axis, with spirituality below (or within) and science above (or around). This central position helps us appreciate the intended function of religion (to connect these two realms) as well as understand how and where it begins to fail. In this post I will turn this axis 90º to the horizontal and picture it as a moving time-line from left (the past) to right (the future). The question now is, “How has religion evolved through the millenniums, and is this evolution more or less haphazard or does it proceed according to a deeper design?”

Snow Cone 2I will build a case that religion evolves as human beings develop, which means that the larger cultural shifts we observe across the centuries are deeply correlated to changes unfolding (or arrested) at the individual level of human consciousness. The above illustration is pulled forward from my most recent post (Religion and The Snow Cone Universe), but in place of the word “religion” I have inserted a graphic representing what I will explain as three stages in the evolution and organization of consciousness. “Stage” here will be used in two senses of the word: as a developmental period of time and as a kind of platform (think theater stage) that provides consciousness with a specific vantage point on reality.

Thankfully we don’t need to do a lot of research or dig into cultural archaeology to start making sense of these stages I have in mind, for they are represented in the very structure of your consciousness as a human being. Just as your individual development is unfolding according to a sequence of distinct stages, so religion has been evolving along that same advancing line. So, I’ll ask you to sit back and take a look at yourself.

Stage One: BODY

Let’s just get the hard fact out of the way: You’re an animal. You breathe, burp, and bleed just like other animals. You were born, grew up, and one day you will die – just like other animals. Inside and under your skin is a complicated system of tissues, glands, organs and nerves, pulsing together as an interconnected web of urgencies. The urge to breathe, for instance, is a compulsion that evolved around the need of your cells for oxygen (and to blow off carbon dioxide); breathing is an urgency. Many other urgencies are presently taking care of what this animal nature of yours requires to live.

Like other animals, you possess an instinctive intelligence that has been evolving for millions of years and across numerous species. Through a network of impulses, reflexes, drives, and adaptive routines instinct serves to uphold a dialogue between the internal urgencies keeping you alive and the larger rhythms of your external environment. The cycles of Sun, moon, and seasons are intricately timed with your needs for activity and rest, arousal and reproduction, nourishment and shelter. You don’t have to think about this provident coincidence since the urgency that anchors it in your throbbing viscera is unconscious and graciously impersonal.

From the stage of your body, reality is physical, vibrant, sensual – and alive. Since everything in you and around you is caught up in a pulsing tango (and tangle) of urgency and rhythm, from this vantage point nothing is inert or uninvolved. Colors, sounds, odors, flavors, temperature, current, texture, pressure and weight: a kind of glory cascades across the dazzling variety of forms, effervescing to the surface and dancing on your senses. It’s not you over here and that over there, but you and that together, partners in the same cosmic dance.

At this stage religion is animistic, connecting and closing the circuit between the inner mystery and outer cosmos by a mythology of hidden agencies. Anima is Latin for vital force or life-force, a related term to spirit, meaning breath. It’s not that something else is on the other side of what we perceive with our senses, but rather that what we perceive with our senses participates in and manifests forces that hold everything together. Again, these are not supernatural personalities (deities) pushing things around (that idea comes later) but creative energies expressing outward from the interior of things.

Stage Two: EGO

In addition to being an animal and having an animal nature, you – and this especially refers to the you you think you are – are an identity project of your tribe. Ego is also from the Latin, translating as I, the subjective center of a separate self. You needed this separate center so your tribe could shape an identity around it and assign your place in the larger role-play of society. For this to happen with reasonable success, your animal nature (body) needed to be trained (i.e., socialized) to behave properly – not to bite, pass gas, or mate in public. In addition to such constraints on unacceptable behavior you were conditioned by your tribe to be polite, cooperate with others, and pick up your toys.

All of this social shaping of identity (ego) is what we generally call morality. The individual is expected to follow the rules and respect authority, and not only because those in charge have their hands on the carrots and sticks. It just makes for an easier life together in community. Your tribe dutifully (but not always very competently) instructed you with the preferences, values, and beliefs that demonstrated obedience. Because all of this happened in the first decade or so of your life, the part of your personality where these moral sentiments and reflexes still reside is known as your inner child. Most of what goes on in there is deeply conditioned but nonrational – prompted and carried along on scripts of flattery and shame, praise and blame, guilt and appeasement.

Another strong virtue of early childhood was your gift for fantasy. Daydream, dress-up, role play and pretending to be someone (else) occupied much of your time. Fairy tales and closet monsters were sources of endless fascination or bedtime anxiety. Fantasy is your creative intelligence for making things up and acting as if what you can’t see is more real than what you can. Your tribe exploited this native ability of yours and got you invested in the collective fantasy of meaning-making, producing a kind of semantic shelter in the world you shared. As long as this world-construct was confirmed and reinforced in the habits of everyday life, the illusion of its reality could be maintained.

Religion at this stage is theistic (from theos, god) referring to the belief in higher powers that model human character and supervise the world from the margins. When you were a child these higher powers were literally your “taller powers” – i.e., the adults who were in charge of things and provided for your needs. Theism postulates (but doesn’t prove) an intention behind and above the world, representing an important advancement on the spontaneous and impersonal life-force of animism. The gain was that theism introduced the notion of there being a plan and purpose in the nature of things that we can interrogate, petition, and perhaps even influence for our benefit.

Stage Three: SOUL

Currently, and for the past several millenniums, human beings have been comfortably established in second-stage culture and religion. The reason is simply that ego has been the dominant mental location of human consciousness for that long. Theism, as the religious system coordinating deity, tribe, and ego, has provided orientation and meaning to our species for a long time. Until fairly recently, that is, when our cosmology (scientific model of the universe) began to render the old myths unbelievable.

When one stage is passing and before the next stage is fully entered, the phase we find ourselves in can be very disorienting. Once-true believers lose faith, members leave their churches, denominations don’t seem to work anymore, and the “spiritual but not religious” look for inspiration from other sources. We can also see the endangered religions growing more desperate and violent, putting up their defenses and terrorizing nonbelievers. It is tempting to conclude that such is the nature of religion itself, and that we will be much better off without it.

To understand the third stage of religion, however, we need to look beyond the anxiety, hostility, and depression of the disoriented ego. Your inner child is not capable of creating the life you really want. It’s not only stuck in the problem, it’s where the problem is centered. What you really need is to ascend to the mental location of your higher self – rational and responsible as an adult ought to be, but also emotionally balanced and intellectually engaged. You don’t need to leave your passion and creativity back in childhood (or repressed in your personality).

What is soul? Let’s first say what it isn’t, exposing some popular efforts to hang on to ego. It isn’t a ghostly replica of the body’s physical form, and it’s not another word for the immortal ego. Soul isn’t what continues on after you die, as a disembodied personality moving residence to the next earthly incarnation, new celestial home, or some metaphysical higher plane. All of these explanations are trying to figure out what happens to you when you die, when you – again, at the mental location of ego – are nothing more than a temporal construct of social roles, attitudes, and beliefs. Your third-stage challenge is to open yourself to a post-ego way of being, where “me and mine” are no longer anchors of ultimate concern.

The “post” in post-ego – as well as in post-theism, the religion of our third stage – doesn’t require that you renounce your ego, throw it down, or try to stomp it out of existence. It simply means after, referring to a way of life oriented on the essential realization that All is One, which logically comes after the illusion of your separateness (ego) has been transcended. In the light of this realization you instantly understand that you, as an individual, are a participant in the larger communion of beings. Morality is no longer about obedience to another’s command, but is rather about making choices and taking action with a much (much) larger context in mind.

Notice how this insight marks an advance beyond the animism of Stage One, where the emphasis was more on the peculiar manifestation of the life-force in a tree, a thunderstorm, or in the body itself. This is the difference between instinct (unconscious, compulsive, urgent) and wisdom (fully conscious, contemplative, intentional). A higher capacity for holding the awareness that All is One had to wait on the ability to open your mind without losing it, to detach your focus without getting distracted, and to jump from your highest thought into the mystery encompassing all things.

Religion and the Snow Cone Universe

snow cone universeThe role of religion for millenniums has been to connect (or tie together, from the Latin religare) the inner and outer realms of human experience. This sounds odd nowadays, given that religions the world over are presently fomenting (or at least justifying) violence against minorities and outsiders in the name of their gods, as they work to successfully separate the true believer from this fallen and sinful world.

But as with everything else, a thoughtful consideration of religion needs to distinguish between its essential function (by design, so to speak) and what it has become under the various conditions of history, geography, and culture. If this or that religion exploits our natural insecurity, heaps guilt on our heads, and pulls us into spiritual depression, should we just reject religion itself as a negative force on our planet? Increasingly this is the popular opinion of secular minds.

Whatever its peculiar manifestation, however, religion will always serve a necessary function in human culture – at least this is my argument. Its particular form (animistic, theistic, or post-theistic) and denomination (totemic, Southern Baptist, or Zen Buddhist) is more or less a “sign of the times,” but the phenomenon of religion itself is critical to our ongoing evolution as a species. The reason is that our quest for a meaningful connection between the inner and outer realms of experience corresponds to the nature of human consciousness itself.

Simply put, the conscious self is aware in two primary directions – outward to its surroundings and inward to its own deep interior. Take a moment to notice this for yourself. The physical apparatus of your body and brain has the task of coordinating your behavior with the changing conditions of circumstance, in a way that is both adaptive and advantageous. Success-oriented behavior (in this sense) doesn’t really require much conscious intention; life on this planet evolved for millions of years without it. But with the advent of more sophisticated nervous systems came a “surplus” of conscious awareness, which in humans (at least) opened attention to the deeper and larger mystery of existence. Homo Philosophicus.

What I’m calling the deeper mystery of existence is the inner realm whence consciousness itself arises. At some inner threshold of this descending awareness, the ego, referring to that contraction of self-possession acknowledged as “I-myself,” gets loose in the joints and begins to fall apart. As we would expect, this threat to its own self-possession generates confusion and anxiety in the ego, which may persuade it to resist further descent and recover control. But this is precisely where religion, in its role as counselor and guide to the deeper mystery, encourages the nervous psychonaut (“soul explorer”) to let go in full surrender to the provident ground of being.

Such inward exploration and expansion of consciousness into its own depths is what I mean by “spirituality.” Because this is the inner realm of our human nervous system, it seems safe to assume that the nature of experience at this deeper register of consciousness is virtually the same today as it was many thousands of years ago. Getting there might have been more of a challenge back then, given the urgencies of survival in the forest or savanna, but I can imagine a distant hominid ancestor dropping into contemplative awareness on a warm African morning.

Spirituality is inherently mystical, or at least it has a strong tendency to sink into the grounding mystery where our separate self (ego) dissolves into an ineffable presence. In this space grows an awareness that existence itself rests in, rises out of, and returns to essential communion. And yet, when we return to the surface where our relationships and daily responsibilities await, we feel compelled to talk about it. That’s the paradox: trying to put into words what no words can qualify or contain.

Talking about something beyond words requires a form of language that can represent this mystery metaphorically. Even to speak of the experience as a “descent” across a “threshold” (or series of thresholds) into a deep “ground” is using language in a highly symbolic way. The experience is not literally this but nevertheless really is! Metaphors serve the purpose of “carrying across” (meta-phorein) into verbal intelligence something that doesn’t lend itself to objective thinking; it’s not even some thing.

Religion’s preferred vehicle for such metaphorical representation is myth, referring to a narrative plot (Greek mythos) that serves as the backbone of story. The picture language anchored to this action-line only seems ancillary to the cause-and-effect sequence of the story itself, when its true purpose is to pull awareness into contemplation of a timeless mystery behind it all. This is essentially no different from contemplating any other form of well-composed art: You begin by looking at it, but soon enough you are pulled through it and into the creative consciousness that brought it forth.

For a myth to make sense, at least at the surface level, the architecture of reality it assumes must be compatible with the cosmology of the times. Ancient cosmology envisioned the outer realm as arranged vertically, with distinct levels (typically three) connected by an axis passing through the center of a stationary earth. The action of gods, heroes, and saviors – again, acknowledged as metaphorical representations – naturally conformed to this “up and down” structure of reality.

Deities had to come down from heaven and go back up again. Heroes and saviors might descend to the underworld (in death or by some secret passage) and come back up (by resurrection or escape) with boons for their community. By the Christian era, the departed saved and the departed damned were imagined as “up” in heaven or “down” in hell, as the case may be.

By virtue of the vibrant connection between the inner realm of spirituality and the outer realm of cosmology, ancient religion was an active sponsor of our awareness of living in a “universe” – the turning-as-one of all things. Whereas the term cosmos simply refers to the “order” we can perceive around us, a true sense of the universe to which we belong reflects a mental integration of this order with the grounding mystery in which all things exist. In this way, an active appreciation of the universe is a product of spirituality (mystical union) and cosmology (surrounding order).

The outer realm is our context of life, the expanding environment in which we human beings need to locate ourselves. If we can detach the discipline of science from the peculiar tradition of Western science as we know it today, then even the three-story model that stood as background architecture to the ancient myths may be appreciated as “scientific,” as a theoretical explanation drawn from straightforward observations of the outer realm. Today, a myth of visitors from outer space is more compatible with our current cosmology, and hence more believable to the modern mind, than the up-and-down traffic that would have made sense back then.

And this is where things started slipping with religion, not too many centuries ago. As science pursued an updated cosmology based on newly invented observational instruments (e.g., the Greek astrolabe and European telescope) and mathematical calculations, the older myths couldn’t keep up. More accurately, as we can see in our own day, the belief systems that had gotten attached to those older myths didn’t want to keep up. Science was pulling the hearts and minds of people into a secular and godless age, undermining faith and threatening the eternal security of “doubting believers.”

What had for millenniums coordinated a meaningful dialogue between the inner and outer realms of human experience thus dug in its heels and held fast to an obsolete science, trading intellectual relevance for emotional conviction. And the stories? What became of the myths? Lacking a respectable cosmology to back them up, the only way to take myths seriously was to read them literally – as eye-witness accounts of supernatural and miraculous events. This required a bold division between other people’s myths and our salvation history, which New Testament authors were busy making already in the late first century CE (cf. 2 Peter 1:16).

Doubly tragic for religion was its aggressive campaign against spirituality, increasingly identified with “mysticism” and censored as godless self-absorption. Any teaching that encouraged an individual to surrender completely to union with the divine, understood as the non-objective presence and grounding mystery of being, was condemned out of hand as heresy, blasphemy, and atheism. Despite the fact that the major theistic traditions all contain subcurrents of spirituality which are clearly mystical in orientation, the mainstream ideologies (in pulpit and press) regard such practices with a high degree of suspicion.

However much the religions have failed in fulfilling their purpose (as religion), the need persists for human beings to meaningfully connect the inner and outer realms of experience. To whatever extent we can create new metaphors to carry our spiritual intuitions of the grounding mystery into a cosmology big enough to frame the stars, deep enough to appreciate our place in the evolution of life, and wise enough to use our considerable influence for the good of our planet and future generations – to that extent we will be healed, made whole, and rediscover the holiness of being alive.

Myth and the Magic Eye

Sigmund Freud regarded dreams as the “royal road” to the unconscious. His breakaway student, Carl Jung, used this same approach in his interpretation of the great cultural dreams known as myths. Whether the images and strange storylines come up for the individual at night or arise from a “collective unconscious” of human nature, these two analysts were convinced they provide insight into the deeper conflicts and waking potential of our species.

For millenniums the dreams of culture have been spun like webs out of our mythic imagination and then inhabited as the narrative structure of a peculiarly human world. As I have argued in recent blog posts, the inspiration for this construction of meaning originates in our spontaneous experience of the present mystery of reality, as the provident uplift of being itself. The world picture we construct needs to be sufficiently compatible with the actual facts of objective reality to be relevant to our given situation. Thus spirituality as contemplative engagement with the ground within us, and science as the investigative engagement with the universe around us, are where the human web of meaning is anchored to reality.

In former ages, religion is what cultivated the connection (religare, to tie back or connect) between spirituality and science. It authorized the myths and symbols representing this link between inner and outer, as well as choreographed rituals and ceremonies uniting the tribe around a common focus. Religion’s primary role was to supervise a liturgy (literally the work of the people) that maintained meaning and kept the world (Peter Berger’s “sacred canopy”) intact.

But while the deep experience of the grounding mystery is likely the same today as it was thousands of years ago by virtue of a relatively identical nervous system across our species, our understanding of the universe has advanced dramatically. We don’t any longer hold the world picture of a three-story cosmos, with a celestial realm above the clouds for god and the saints, a nether realm underground for the dead and damned, and an earthly realm in between where the living work out their mortal destinies. Our current cosmology contemplates a universe that is perhaps 14 billion years old, where time is relative and space warps and stretches under gravitational force. There is no “up” or “down” to our universe, no heaven above our heads or hell below our feet.

It was as these discoveries were being made that religion made the fateful mistake of insisting on the literal truth of its myths. Rather than acknowledge sacred story as produced out of the mythic imagination, a “corrective” explanation was provided, claiming that the stories were eye-witness accounts of supernatural and miraculous events that really happened long ago. Perhaps part of what motivated this unfortunate bit of illusionment was the heavy investment religion had already made in the institution of symbols, rituals, sanctuaries, and inherited beliefs. Of course, the more time that passed, the more intellectually incredible the stories became, requiring still more corrective explanations to keep them in play.

As a consequence of this shift from a deep reading of myth to one that takes it literally, the literary gods – compelling forces in the narrative storyline – became literal deities instead and essentially lost their significance. The fact that no contemporary person encountered a literal deity didn’t deter belief. Eventually, in fact, a willingness to believe in the invisible existence of god became a religious mandate on all “true believers.” Believing it anyway testifies to the sincerity (and apparently the veracity) of belief, effectively putting it beyond argument or even evidence to the contrary.

Magic Eye

Let me see if I can illustrate this shift I’m speaking of, from a deep reading to a literal reading of myth. Above is a “Magic Eye” design, where a three-dimensional figure is embedded in the two-dimensional pattern. A literal reading of myth is like trying to figure out what this design means by scanning its surface. There is some obvious redundancy in the pattern, with very slight discrepancies in detail – but these discrepancies are substantial to the real meaning of the design. There seem to be some humanoid figures, or is it bovine? Is that a flash of lightning or a fish of some sort? And then there’s all that fuzzy confusion in the middle.

A literal reading of myth stays on the surface, just as we’re doing when we scan the two-dimensional pattern of the Magic Eye design. Pattern itself is intriguing to our brains, and they will invent it where one isn’t obvious (think of the star constellations representing mythical creatures, a different set depending on the culture and its native mythology). Unless you are suspecting something more than just what’s on the surface, you will eventually make up a meaning. If tool-use separates us along with other primate and non-primate species from the rest, and tool-making separates the primates from other mammals, then meaning-making is what sets homo sapiens apart from our evolutionary cousins.

But what if the design holds another dimension, inside its two-dimensional arrangement? What if a religious myth is something more than what scans from left to right or reads from “The Beginning” to “The End”? As I said, unless you are open-minded to the possibility, all the sharp detail and drama at the surface will prevent you from going deeper. But if you could, what would you find? If you could stop taking the myth literally and start cultivating an appreciation for it as an artistic product of the mythic imagination (individual or collective), what might it bring to awareness?

Take another look at the Magic Eye design, but this time don’t screw your focus down so hard on the two-dimensional pattern. Instead, let it relax. Let your eyes blur a little as your gaze rests lightly at mid-field of all that visual complexity. Gradually you will feel something pulling on your eye muscles, trying to stretch your attention deeper down into the pattern, toward a three-dimensional image crossing in and out of focus. Be patient. If you’re taking it literally and have been doing so for some time, it will take a while for your eyes to give up their fixated hold.

The exact same can be said of a mind that has been conditioned by culture to read its myths literally. As long as religion reads, teaches, and defends its sacred stories as literally true eye-witness accounts of supernatural and miraculous events, more and more people will opt out. Human beings need relevance, and a myth that’s been reduced to its surface – one that is thousands of years out of date – is perfectly irrelevant.

Despite religion’s coercive effort in arguing otherwise, believing in the factual accuracy of sacred stories is not a demonstration of faith but only of the willingness to cast aside common sense, suspend responsible thinking, and ignore evidence or the lack of it. When the early Christian theologian Tertullian (160-225 CE) defined faith as “believing because it is absurd,” he was admitting that biblical mythology had begun to lose relevance even back then.

So relax and open up. This story may be time-bound by its historical and scientific references, but it came from a deep place outside of time that mystics call the Eternal Now. This place is within you as well. If you look without an expectation of what should be there, of what orthodoxy says must be there, the truth might be revealed.

A deep reading of religious myth allows the transient details at the surface to fall aside, revealing a mirror into its creative source. The myth is an invitation to self-awareness, far below what you assumed it was all about.

Why Religion Can’t Advance

Working from the root meaning of the word “religion” (from Latin religare) I’ve been making a case for it as a necessary and essential dimension of human cultural life. Even theism, which I don’t regard as the only model of religion worth considering, occupies a critical place in the development and “awakening” of human consciousness to the present mystery of reality. So when I say that “religion can’t advance,” I am not advocating for its abandonment (finally) for the sake of progress and other modern values. I’m saying that it presently can’t but needs to advance.

If religion can be liberated from its current deadlock, it stands a good chance of fulfilling its primary function as incubator of the human spirit. I don’t use the words spirit or spirituality with any metaphysical associations – as something that inhabits and survives the body – but rather as metaphor of the mystical intuition and creative intelligence that links us, as the rhythmic urgency of breathing from which the metaphor of spirit derives (Greek pneuma, Latin spiritus), to the deeper and larger reality in which we (hopefully) find ourselves.

In its current condition religion isn’t serving our spiritual incubation as a species, but is rather holding the human spirit captive. Instead of lifting us up and setting us free, it is holding us down and locking us inside toxic convictions. The polarization between complacency and terrorism, between those who use religion to cultivate security and privilege and those who use it to justify resentment and violence, is setting the stage for our likely extinction – one way or the other.

A fast-growing third party, which I’ll call the unaffiliated commonsense liberals, is working hard to throw god down and expose the underlying pathology in religion. They take a “surgical” approach to the solution: Cut it out and move on. It’s time to grow up. No more sleeping in mommy’s lap or pleading with daddy to save us. We need to leave religion in the nursery with our pacifiers and security blankets. We’re on our own, folks.

But religion isn’t a product of infantile dependency – or at least it’s not only that. To those who sit in church pews or strap on explosives it must also be said that religion is not about getting “it” right or proving “them” wrong. It’s not really about you at all. In fact, the widespread assumption that religion is about me and my security, my meaning, my purpose, or my destiny in the next life is precisely where religion today is stuck. So if I’m going to clear some space for a fourth option – not complacency, not terrorism, and not atheism either – then we need to spend a little time trying to understand what’s in the way.

Ego 1Taking an historical and evolutionary perspective on the phenomenon of religion reveals it as something that has developed over time. This development of religion is correlated to the emergence of individual consciousness – of the growing awareness in the individual of himself or herself as an individual, an irreducible center of identity. This is what is meant by the term “ego,” or I: an anchoring reference point of a self-conscious orientation in reality.

Identity has to do with being a part of something, at the same time as you are apart from other things. This is the dynamic of attachment (a part of, belonging) and separation (apart from, distinction) that each of us must negotiate – or I should rather say, the negotiation of which results in who each of us comes to be.

Archetypally we can associate our attachment need with Mother and our separation need with Father, regardless of who actually plays these primary roles in our early life. What in psychology is called “ego strength” is the centered, stable, and healthy balance in the personality between our ego needs to fit in and feel secure on the one hand, and to stand out and feel special on the other.

Ego 2Now, let’s pretend that this all goes reasonably well. We are enabled to occupy our own center of identity, as the tether for an expanding perspective on reality, a widening sphere of concerns, values, and choices. With maturity we understand ourselves within the increasing complexity of our situation, managing the balance between our dependency and responsibility.

A healthy and stable identity provide us with two critical points of access to the present mystery of reality, one opening downward to what is within us, and the other opening upward to what is beyond us. I call these two orientations communion and transcendence, respectively, and together they represent the farther reaches of our human nature.

They are complementary principles like Yin and Yang, with communion inviting awareness to sink below the consciousness of self, in a gradual and steady release of identity until all reference to “me and mine” has dissolved away. Transcendence works in the opposite direction, not releasing the ego but going beyond it across an extended web of relationships.

A religion that affirms and supports ego strength in this healthy sense will encourage the practitioner to “go within” for communion with the grounding mystery and “go beyond” in transcendence to the universe that is our home. Healthy religion – not the kind that is stuck with the ego and can’t advance – should thus be the outspoken advocate for both “mystical” (ground) and “scientific” (universe) research. In that case, each of us would regularly practice meditation (whatever helps you descend the rhythms of your body and enter that deep clearing of a calm presence) and build out a rational model of reality based on the evidence of careful observation.

If we stop pretending for a moment and instead take account of how things have actually gone with religion, we can begin to appreciate where it gets hung up. For whatever reason, ego strength isn’t established and the functional balance in our need for attachment and separation is thrown off-center. Because our personal histories are unique, how it happens for you will be different from how it happens for me, but the consequences of our dislocation (Buddhist dukha) will be predictably similar.Ego 3When our insecurity overwhelms the need to separate and become our own person, any number of “attachment disorders” may result. To some extent, however, they all have to do with our desperate drive to put ourselves beneath what (or whom) we hope will dispel our anxiety. Submission, in the sense of throwing ourselves on the mercy of god (or whatever) out of a sense of guilt, shame, or depravity, regards “the other” as everything and the self as nothing. Typically “the other” – represented in an external deity perhaps – is really an externalization of the sick ego’s own self-condemnation. Confessing our unworthiness and inability to change brings a brief but temporary relief of the burden, as the shameful part of ourselves is admitted to be seen. But it won’t last, and we’ll soon be back for another “fix.”

A different set of problems emerges when our need for attachment is not adequately met and we are left to establish ourselves by showing off and chasing fame. Whereas healthy development would give us the strength to go beyond “me” and “mine” for the sake of cooperation, participation, and even self-sacrifice for a greater good, an inability to get beyond ourselves compels us to self-inflation instead. Now it really is all about me. Individuals with “separation disorders” crave recognition, are fixated on self-importance, seek their own glory, and have to be better than others. (This sounds a bit like the biblical deity Yahweh in his adolescent phase.) Tragically, their passionate drive to stand out and be recognized too often alienates the very audience whose praise and approval they so desperately need, and they end up alone.

                                                                                  

So where does all of this lead me, as it concerns the present predicament of religion? Once again, I don’t think the answer is to “be done” with religion and finally grow up. Clearly the lukewarm and sentimental religion in many of our churches won’t help us much, nor is violence in god’s name (whichever god) our way through. We don’t need to condemn the ego or glorify it. But we can drop it from time to time and sink into an ineffable mystery; we can leap off its shoulders into a larger experience of what is going on all around us.

Of course, to let go of ourselves requires an ability to let go of some other things as well. One step at a time …