A Foundational Anthropology

We must have some idea of who we are, or, at least, who we see ourselves to be, before we can begin our theologizing. If we can understand how we are constituted we can gain insight into how we know what we know. Once we appreciate how we know what we know, we will know how to do our theology. Theology is dependent upon epistemology, which is itself dependent upon anthropology.

Three Assumptions

It is my intention to deal with the subject of anthropology in this chapter by questioning three assumptions underlying many tacit, Western anthropologies.

The first of these is the often unchallenged assumption that thinking is our most important faculty, an ability that distinguishes us from sub-human primates. We are thinking animals. We are what we think.

The second assumption is that there is a direct, causal relationship between thought, decision-making and action. Action stems from calmly and deliberately determining the advantages and disadvantages of particular actions. If we act in ways others consider morally reprehensible, it is because we have made a deliberate decision to act in this way.

The third assumption is that we exist separately from each other and from the rest of the ecosystem.

THE OVER-EVALUATION OF THE THINKING FUNCTION

The first assumption we shall explore is the notion that thinking is our most important function.

The Greek Influence

In adopting this view we have been influenced by classical Greek philosophy.

Socrates (469-399 BCE) was concerned with moral behaviour and argued that virtue springs from knowledge and that error is due to ignorance. He plied individuals with skilful question to challenge traditional understandings and to cajole his victims into discovering truth for themselves. As a consequence of knowing the truth they would do it. Properly educated minds would pursue virtue.

Socrates' star disciple, Plato (427-347 BCE), argued that true knowledge derives, not from the senses, but from archetypal Ideas, from contemplation [6] of the world of eternal Forms. It was thought, or conceptual knowledge, that revealed the universal, changeless, essential elements of reality. Phenomena, perceived by the senses, were pale reflections of eternal Ideas or Forms. The tree in your back yard has its ideal representation in the eternal world of Forms. Reason, an aspect of soul, was the principal organ of knowledge, essential to discerning a rational universe. Forms made up an organic and harmonious world with which our thoughts needed to correspond for us to discern ultimate reality.

Plato argued that thinking was an exercise of one's immortal soul, that is, of the intellectual and moral personality, which recognized eternal Forms through a process of recollection or remembering. This soul comprised three parts, reason, the co-ordinator or ruler, the higher emotions, such as love of fame or just anger and the intractable and rebellious lower carnal lusts. In his image of the charioteer and his two horses in the "Phaedrus", Plato depicted reason, the driver, assisted by a good and co-operative horse, the higher emotions, extended to the limit to subdue and control the undisciplined fury of the bad horse, the carnal lusts.

The body, the animal part of us, whence these lusts derived, needed to be controlled. The battle was continuous and exhausting. Plato saw this conflict parallelling the wider conflict within the World-Soul, between Necessity, a disorderly element, and Divine Reason, in which the former was never completely brought to heel.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE), who studied at Plato's Academy, accepted the latter's distinction between a world of Ideas and a world of sense, or matter, both of which he considered eternal. Aristotle inverted Plato's emphasis, however, in concentrating on concrete experiences and particular objects. His teaching, which distinguished between the theoretical sciences (mathematics, physics, metaphysics), the practical sciences (ethics, politics) and the creative sciences (mechanical and artistic production), gave a fillip to the development of physics, biology, psychology, ethics and politics. Aristotle was also responsible for the development of scientific logic, which he argued was centred in definition and syllogism, or deductive reasoning. Like Socrates and Plato, Aristotle regarded the mind as the organ of knowledge.

These three principal Greek philosophers contributed significantly to what Ken Wilber has described as the emergence of the self-conscious mind from an embededness in the classical mythologies and of the individual from the embrace of exclusively communal identity, that is, to the transition from the Mythic Membership stage to the Mental Egoic stage in the development of human consciousness.¹ It also led, in the West, to the development of reasoning, philosophy, mathematics and science.

The Shadow Side

The effects of this development, however, have not all been positive. [7]

In more recent years we have recognized that scientific and technological developments have outstripped our capacity to manage them morally and we realize that we have been led, without being aware of what was happening, to a commitment to unrestrained "progress".

Further negative effects have also been obvious.

The emphasis the "gang of three" placed on the importance of the mind, and of thinking, was accompanied by a depreciation of the body. This dichotomy between mind and body, or between soul/spirit and matter, was further developed by the Neoplatonists,² and particularly the Gnostics, and deeply affected the thinking of the early church. One of the most influential of the early church fathers, Augustine, whose acceptance of the church's message was facilitated by the Neo-Platonic flavour of Bishop Ambrose' preaching, further exaggerated this tendency. Influenced by Manichean and Christian teaching on the need for celibacy on the part of those who aspired to excellence, he bequeathed to the church a rejecting attitude towards human sexuality that was partially a consequence of the difficulty he had in suppressing a powerful sexual libido.

As a result of these developments, the West has suffered from a body--mind dualism, which has led, on the one hand, to hyper-rationality, and on the other, to depreciation of the body, and, particularly among men, to a repression of feelings and sexuality. Because men, dominant in a patriarchal society, needed to convince themselves that they were rational and controlled, their feelings and sexuality were unconsciously repressed and projected onto women, who were regarded as emotionally unstable sexual temptresses. As a consequence, the West has been blighted by a second dualism, sexist dualism, a corollary of mind--body dualism. The neuroses from which we in the West suffer relate to these dualisms, or, more particularly, to those poles of the dualisms which we have rejected and repressed.

Reactions

The over-emphasis we have placed on mind/reason/thinking has, in more recent years, evoked criticism from a number of quarters.

We have become aware of the aridity of a sheerly rationalistic approach to life. This has been evident, in reflection, in the shortcomings of Deism, Logical Positivism and Linguistic Analysis. It has also surfaced in criticism of the texture of many of our intellectual productions, evident in Bernice Slote's critique of twentieth century poetry, which she argues is plagued by a joyless intellectualism that has exiled the body.³ This persisting pathology, or hyper-rationalism, has also influenced our preference for cleverness over wisdom and has led to our creating idolatrous ideologies. It has also herded us into isolated canyons, where, forgetful of our destiny, and thrust into the position of needing to act as champions of competing scholasticisms, we are [8] seduced into debate over questions of intellectual order. We have become servants of an arid rationalism, a species of thinking that aborts and atrophies initiative and creativity.

Rumblings of protest against an exclusively rational approach to anthropology have been evident in a number of developments.

The Romantic Movement, reflected in the poetry of William Wordsworth and the philosophy of Henri Bergson, protested against the dominance of reason and the neglect of feeling, imagination and intuition.⁴ This protest continued to find expression, in this century, an expression reflected in A. D. Hope's Pseudodoxia Epidemica, which taunted reason with ignoring the reasons of the heart.⁵

Reaction to Rationalism was also evident in the theology of Friedrich Daniel Schleiermacher. The father of modern theology, Schleiermacher, as a consequence of Kant's critique of traditional, rational proofs of the existence of God, emphasised the importance of experience, feeling and sentiment--factors traditionally associated with women--in human flourishing and in Christian living and theology. A similar emphasis is discernible in Paul Tillich's fascination with Schelling's philosophy of nature, with its emphasis on a mystical participation in the beauty of the natural world⁶ and with the discernment of the divine Spirit in that world.⁷

Process Theologians have also helped release us from captivity to the Greek notion of a divine apathaea, the idea that God does not feel our pain, that is, that God remains detached from human and ecological tragedy. They have spoken of a God of compassion, who is affected, even changed, though not in the integrity of God's moral being, through involvement with us. As parents are affected by what happens to their children, so God is impacted upon by our attitudes, behaviours and tragedies.

Over recent years, the insights of Jung have come to exercise a considerable influence in the West. Among these are the contention that we are governed, not solely by reason, but by a quaternity of functions, thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. He also emphasised our essential androgeneity, that is, the fact that men and women possess, at least potentially, what, in the West, came to be regarded as masculine and feminine qualities.⁸

The West has also been influenced by Eastern wisdom, reflected in the growing popularity of Buddhism. Eastern philosophy argues that reason, or logic, is not necessarily the most direct, appropriate or effective route to knowledge or wisdom. Many Western scholars, aware of the inadequacies of Western paradigms, have gravitated to what Leibnitz described as the perennial philosophy,⁹ a predominantly Eastern view of personhood and human development. An illustration of this new trend is Ken Wilber's The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development.¹⁰ In this work Wilber marries psychologies of the East and West, developing a maturational model that incorporates both. [9]

We have also been sobered in recent years by the twin threats of nuclear war and ecological disaster into reassessing the value of science, or, more particularly, of "scientific progress". We recognize that science has its dark side, that it is both gift and menace. We have learned, from bitter experience, what the Christian mystics of the Middle Ages saw with great clarity, that we cannot ravish our environment with impunity.

Feminists, particularly eco-feminists, have been reinforcing this message, generally placing the blame on a rationalistic, depredacious patriarchy with its warring sky gods. They argue that we should replace hierarchies with relational webs and, turning a male criticism of women on its head, they contend that there are circumstances in which there is human and ecological advantage in "not making sense", that is, in a sheerly rationalistic sense. While it can be argued that their criticism of hierarchy, per se, is misplaced, and should be directed against pathologies associated with particular hierarchies, and while their web-of-life hypothesis, which doesn't account for natural hierarchies, is mischievous,¹¹ the consequences of a lop-sided development of rationality are clearly evident in ecological degradation.

The most serious challenge to mind-body dualism is the growing body of evidence that suggests that mind and body are not separate entities.

What used to be called psycho-somatic illness was early evidence of the influence of mind on body.

Recent experiments have demonstrated that by thought one can inhibit a degree of reaction to injected skin-test material, overriding the physical responses of the body. This has even occurred where the cells were in test tubes outside the body.¹² It has also been discovered that the functioning of the immune system can be altered through meditation.¹³ As Jonas Salk commented, the mind has the power to influence the immune system.¹⁴

It should also be noted that healing methodologies, that are premised on the belief that mind and body are intimately connected, such as bio-energetics and kinesiology, have become increasingly popular.

Deepak Chopra, an endocrinologist, in Quantum Healing, explores the interconnection between mind and body, drawing attention to the fact that mind and memory are not exclusively located in the brain but are in every cell of the body and can be influenced by attitude and meditation.¹⁵ Further testimony comes from Candace B. Pert, former chief of brain-chemistry at the US National Institute of Mental Health, who commented that we cannot make an absolute distinction between the brain and the body. She argued that we must begin considering ways in which consciousness finds expression through different parts of the body.¹⁶ It is inappropriate to talk of the body as separate from the mind, as if there were two separate entities relating to each other. It would be more accurate to describe our integrated constitution as body-mind. [10]

Larry Dossey, a specialist in internal medicine, told of two extraordinary cases from his medical practice, which cannot be explained by conventional medical science and which highlighted the complexity, subtlety and power of the body/mind. The first instance was of a women, who, though blind from birth and under anaesthetic, could, following an operation, describe the consternation among the surgeons and nurses during her cardiac arrest, the scribbles on the notice board outside the operating theatre, the colour of the sheets covering the operating table, the hairstyle of the head scrub nurse, the names of the surgeons waiting in the doctors' lounge in the corridor and the fact that the anaesthetist, who attended to her, was wearing unmatched socks.¹⁷ The second instance concerned a woman, who, to explore the source of abdominal pain, put herself into a meditative state and journeyed into her body, where she discovered three white spots on her left ovary. When she insisted that she did not have cancer, but that her state of health was being influenced by these three white spots, the surgeon to whom she spoke humoured her. During consequent surgery three cystic lesions on the left ovary were discovered and removed.¹⁸

WHY WE ACT AS WE DO

The second assumption that I want to challenge is the belief that we always act for the reasons we think we do.

This proposition is seriously flawed. The fact that it generally remains unchallenged is due largely to our need to preserve the illusion that our behaviour is controlled by our wills, and, therefore, by our thought processes. However, while thinking and conscious decision-making do play a role, we are far more influenced by unconscious factors than we are willing to admit. Part of the reason we do not admit to unconscious motivations is that the unconscious is below the threshold of awareness.

As a consequence of the researches of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and others, it is no longer possible for us to dismiss the importance of the unconscious in human motivation. Further support comes from Karl Marx, who has pointed to ancillary influences, economic realities, which he concluded generated forms of consciousness and controlling ideologies. As a result of such insights, it is becoming recognized that a broad range of subliminal factors affect the way we experience reality. The invisibility of the Afro-Americans in American History before the 1960's and of Aborigines in Australian history until more recent times, are evidence of such phenomena.¹⁹

The fact that we are influenced by factors of which we are unaware, and that are effectively out of our control, means that our judgement is skewed and our actions are contaminated by such elements. It also means that no two people face life, its challenges and moral decisions, with equal advantages or handicaps. [11]

THE INTERCONNECTEDNESS OF ALL REALITY

The third factor I would like to challenge is the notion that we are separate from each other and from the rest of our eco-system, an assumption which Pir Vilayat Khan contended was our greatest limitation.²⁰ I intend to argue, against this assumption, that we are intimately connected with others, with the fauna and flora, in fact, with the entire universe and with a universal Self which constitutes the whole.

The Illusion

The notion that we are separate, isolated centres of consciousness is an illusion. Einstein argued that we are deluded if we imagine that we exist separately from the rest of the universe.²¹ Sebastian Moore put this insight more colourfully, in contending that our bodies are not super-expensive toys, but are bound by a thousand ties into the whole bundle of existence.²²

That we are influenced by and influence each other, and further, that we are interconnected subliminally, is evident from a number of factors.

Human Interconnectedness

Systems theory indicates that we are deeply influenced by family environments, friendships, social affiliations and the culture of the work place. Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger and Hansfried Kellner, in The Homeless Mind, argue, with reference to the influence of Western technology on third world nations, that technology brings with it a specific consciousness, a new way of thinking and being that is destructive of traditional ways of life.²³ Peer pressure, hypnosis, parapsychological phenomena, clearly evident in the Aboriginal tradition of pointing the bone, as well as the electrifying oratory of Adolf Hitler which roused a somnolent Wotan from hibernation in the German psyche,²⁴ are further evidence that we do not exist in isolation from each other, but are interconnected, as cells in a human body. Howard Bloom describes these nubs of cognitive/affective energy, these vigorous mythologies, that operate more subliminally than liminally, as memes. He further argues that they control us rather than us controlling them. We become cell-participants, and sometimes chosen articulators, of powerful, organic ideologies and theologies that enjoy a life of their own, like giant viruses.²⁵

Additional evidence comes from scientific study of the effect of meditation on the health of communities. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the originator of Transcendental Meditation, contended that if only 1% of the population began to meditate their meditating would affect the remaining 99%. Sociologist, Garland Landrith tested this hypothesis in 1973 on a comparison of US cities with populations of 25,000 or over, where critical [12] factors, such as, population, region, college population and previous crime rate trends were kept constant. Landrith discovered that, whereas the "non 1% cities" reflected the national crime rates between 1972 and 1973, those cities in which there were 1% TM participants, evidenced a decrease in the crime rate of 8.2%. The likelihood of these results occurring by change was one in a thousand.²⁶

The fact that we are interconnected with each other is only part of the story. We are also connected with the wider environment.

Humans and Animals

A strong case can be made for an interconnection with the animal kingdom.

Luther Standing Bear, a Sioux Chief, speaking of the traditional spirituality of his people, commented that they felt such a close kinship with all creatures that they spoke a common tongue.²⁷

Those most adept at exploring the affinity between humans and animals have been shamans. Mercia Eliade has argued that the relationship between shamans and animals was spiritual and that it exhibited such mystical intensity that the shaman believed that, by donning the skin of the animal, he actually became that animal. He described this as a going out of the self, as a form of projection, of the shaman's essence, into the animal.²⁸ As S. F. Nadel, who studied Sudanese tribes, argued, shamans were unique, but generally not abnormal.²⁹ Talented and bright, they were a unique class of individuals.³⁰

Scientific evidence is accumulating to suggest that this interconnectedness between humans and animals is not the exotic fantasy of ill-informed "primitives", but an intuitive discernment that has faded from the awareness of Western consciousness. Furthermore, we are now rediscovering that humans can communicate with other species³¹ and that connection with animals is beneficial to human health.³²

Legend has it that when a wolf was ravaging the land around Gubbio in the Apennines, St. Francis talked to the wolf, reasoning with him and persuading him of the error of his ways. The wolf desisted, repented, and, when he died, was buried in consecrated ground. However, too radical to be accommodated, Francis' doctrine of the animal soul was suppressed. It was based on a view of a psychic interconnected of the entire phenomenological universe, which, Francis argued, was designed in this way to glorify the transcendent creator.³³

One explanation of cross-species communication is the presence of a universal Consciousness, or Mind. Taking this possibility of such a factor into account, Lyall Watson, a biologist, spoke of a flow of pattern or instruction between species, a timeless consciousness in which perception occurred by osmosis in the context of a global ecology of mind.³⁴ [13]

Flora

Besides an intuitive interconnectedness between humans and animals, there is also evidence to suggest that we are more closely connected with plants and other flora than we have been led to believe. In what are referred to as the Spendrift experiments, a group of researchers discovered that prayer significantly increases growth of rye seeds, soy beans, mung beans and mould. They also learned that the more the seeds are under stress when they are prayed for the more they grew and that growth was proportional to the time given to prayer. It was also discovered that to achieve any effect it was important for those praying to know what they were praying for and that non-directed prayer was far more effective than directed prayer, or prayer for specific outcomes.³⁵

These experiments with the biosphere confirm the intuitive insights of mystics of all religious traditions. These contemplatives describe their experienced affinity with flora of the biosphere as the "ultimate experience."³⁶ They discern within the flora, as its constituent element, the same Spirit that they experience within themselves.

The Physiosphere

It can also be argued that we connect psychically with what we regard, somewhat arrogantly, as the world of the inanimate.

In a development, whose ambiguity continues to bedevil society, Christianity, in demystifying nature, colonized it, offering its bounty to the rapacious civilization it spawned. The mineral resources of the planet were regarded as inert and there for the taking. However, when the sub-atomic structure of what was considered inanimate matter is taken into account, and when allowance is made for the inter-relatedness of matter, energy and consciousness, it may no longer be ridiculous or quirkish to speak of mineral or gaseous matter as sentient!

Other factors support this contention. Alchemy was premised on the basis of a connectedness between humans and physical substances. I have been into houses, some occupied and others empty, in which I have felt impacted upon by the personalities of inhabitants, past or present, that seem to have been absorbed into the walls and furniture. Jung, in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, wrote of several youthful experiences that were not easily explained. In two separate instances loud retorts revealed weird physical happenings. A centuries-old table cracked down the middle and a knife, resting on a sideboard, snapped in two.³⁷ One explanation of both occurrences would be that the articles absorbed intense, repressed human emotions, resolving this shadow energy in an unusual way. Further support for the thesis, that we influence matter and are influenced by it, is the exercise, on the part of certain Hindu gurus, of siddis, or psychic powers, where substances, like sandalwood or jewellery, are produced out of [14] the air!³⁸ The influence of electro-magnetic fields on human health and behaviour is increasingly becoming a subject of investigation. Further evidence comes from scientific experiments assessing the effectiveness of prayer, that indicate that even mechanical devices can be affected by prayer.³⁹ It is, therefore, hardly strange that Sally McFague should argue that one cannot draw a distinction between living things and what appear to be inanimate objects,⁴⁰ and that she should contend that we are distant cousins to the stars and near relations to the oceans that lap the shores of our continents.⁴¹

I have argued that we do not exist as individuals isolated from each other and from the ecosystem that supports us, including animals, flora and what has traditionally been regarded as inanimate matter. We are part of an inter-connected whole, not only in terms of proximity and food chains, but also at a deeper psychic level. One reason for the West's failure to appreciate this subtle interconnectedness, as Erwin Schrödinger has indicated, has been the presence of, otherwise beneficial, but, in this case, limiting, scientific presuppositions.⁴²

Wilber has argued that our lack of what he describes as unity consciousness arises from the construction, in the various layers of the self, of boundaries between what we distinguish as self and non-self. A final boundary, at the deepest level of the self, he contends, needs to be dissolved, or penetrated, before the presence of this universal Self can be appreciated.⁴³

The Nature of This Interconnectedness

Larry Dossey has argued that this world of complex interconnectedness is a dimension of reality that manifests in phenomena that are non-local and non-temporal.

Non-Local

Jung had suggested that the unconscious enjoys an extension beyond the individual, the limits of which cannot be discerned.⁴⁴ Lawrence LeShan, from the perspective of parapsychology, has contended that psychic healing, like prayer, is effective at a distance, and that it depends on a form of energy, whose effect on people, who may be thousands of miles away, is experienced instantaneously.⁴⁵

Nick Herbert, an authority on non-local effects in physics, argued that such non-local influences were mediated by fields that were not interrupted by matter and that were not restricted to the speed of light. He remarked that ubiquitous non-local connections underlie all the events of everyday life.⁴⁶ In 1964 John Stewart Bell, an Irish physicist, demonstrated mathematically that just such a world existed.⁴⁷

Research into parapsychology also supports the contention that we live in a non-local world. Particularly notable is the work of physicists Harold Puthoff [15] and Russell Targ at the Stamford Research Institute⁴⁸ and Robert G. Jahn, Dean Emeritus of the Princeton University School of Engineering, and a colleague, Brenda J. Dunne. Jahn and Dunne have demonstrated, in a range of remote perception experiments, that the sending of messages from a "sender" to a "receiver" is in no way diminished by distance. They also conclusively demonstrated that humans can mentally influence the outputs of machines keyed to microscopic events that are inherently random, such as radio-active decay.⁴⁹

Non-Temporal

This dimension of reality is also non-temporal.

In the experiments conducted by Jahn and Dunne it was also discovered that some "receivers" received messages three days before they were sent!⁵⁰

Theologians, along with mystics, have drawn attention to two types of time, linear time and eternal time, cronos time and kairos time. Physicists, drawing this same distinction between the commonsense notion of chronological time and the non-flowing, non-linear time in which things do not happen, but simply are, argue that it is the latter that is the ultimate reality. Einstein contended that the distinction between past, present and future was nothing more than a stubborn illusion.⁵¹ Similarly, J. B. Priestly suggested that while we are, to a certain extent, the slaves of chronological time, the temporal freedom of the dreaming self is an experience open to us all.⁵²

Several reasons are advanced to explain our myopia with respect to the reality of a non-temporal world. The first is, as the philosopher, William Irwin Thompson has conjectured, that we are afflicted with a collective hypnosis, sustained by the paradigms we embrace, that prevents us seeing things as they really are.⁵³ A further reason was advanced by Henri Bergson, who argued that we spacialize time, conceiving of duration as extension.⁵⁴ Bernard d'Espagnat, a physicist, suggested that the reason for our incomprehension was that we prefer to think in terms of solids, rather than with fluids, which, because they are fluids, are less amenable to our control.⁵⁵ Kurt Gödel, Austrian mathematician and logician, whose "incompleteness theorems" stunned the world of science, argued that we fail to appreciate that the world is non-temporal because we imagine that mind is located in people's brains. The illusion of the passage of time, he argued, is based on the erroneous perception that we occupy different realities. However, there is really only one reality. We occupy different givens.⁵⁶

Discounting the criticism that people who have non-spacial and non-temporal experiences are psychologically unbalanced, sociologist Andrew Greeley commented that these individuals are not religious nuts or psychiatric cases, but ordinary people, blessed with an above average intelligence and education, and who are less religiously involved than the general population.⁵⁷ He is convinced, with Norman Bradburn, a [16] psychologist at the University of Chicago, that there is a high correlation between psychological balance and mystical experience.⁵⁸

Two Dimensions

To help explain how some experience an interconnectedness with the world around them, while others do not, it has been suggested that reality has, at least, two dimensions. Kurt Goldstein, a psychiatrist, hinted at this in his comment that ordinary and mystical ways of experiencing reality are complimentary. That is, it is possible for us to perceive reality in terms of a taken-for-granted world of subject/object duality, or to experience it as an interconnected unity in which the subject/object duality is overcome.⁵⁹

A helpful way of conceptualizing these two experiences was developed by David Bohm, a former associate of Einstein and now retired professor of Theoretical Physics at Birbeck College in the University of London. Bohm posited the presence of two orders, an implicate order of unity, a holomovement of electromagnetic waves, sound waves, electron beams and other forms of movement, enfolded in an explicate order of diversity. He based his model on the hologram, in which the whole was reflected in every part. He posited a group mind, a unitary mind, in a holographic universe.⁶⁰

A modern Buddhist, Lama Govinda, has similarly conceptualized an inherent unity manifest in diversity. He contends that our essential oneness is not sameness or identity, but a unity based on organic relationships. He further argues that individuality and universality are not mutually exclusive, but are complementary, mutually compensatory sides of the same reality.⁶¹

I have been describing the essence of the implicate order as "unity". However, there are Eastern traditions, like Advaita Vedanta and Theravada Buddhism, that would prefer the concept of non-duality to unity. Putting this point of view, Wilber argues that, while speaking of the oneness of reality is a helpful convention, it is really only a metaphor. The more helpful way of describing this phenomenon would be to describe it as non-dual.⁶² This may seem strange to the matter-of-fact Western mentality, and, therefore, will be interpreted as a bizarre metaphysical construct. However, as Wilber has pointed out, the Eastern formulation does not derive from metaphysical speculation, but from experience.⁶³ This is consistent with Tauler's comment that it is those who have entered into this unity, that is, it is those who are qualified to distinguish the two dimensions, who are best able to appreciate the true meaning of the distinction.⁶⁴

A Universal Mind

One explanation of the interconnectedness of the implicate order is the notion of a universal Mind, or Logos, which is seen as the constituent element, not only of the implicate order, but also of the explicate order, of its rich materiality/diversity. This understanding found expression in the intuitive wisdom of the Vedas and the Upanishads, which pictured a [17] universal Self underlying our physical, psychic and spiritual existence.⁶⁵ Jung reflected that, while Eastern sages had no difficulty with someone saying "I am God", the West regarded such a statement as blasphemous.⁶⁶

Over recent years, however, the New Physics has given support to the notion of a universal Mind. Jacob Bronowski has argued that the assumption that the observed and the observer are inseparable underlies the concept of relativity.⁶⁷ Theoretical physicist, Sir Arthur Eddington, has argued that the stuff of the universe is mind stuff, something that is indefinite but continuous with our mental nature. He went on to contend that the notion of a universal Mind or Logos was in harmony with the present state of scientific theory.⁶⁸

The notion of a universal Mind, which has been further explored in relation to quantum mechanics, has helped us appreciate that we participate in, and, in a sense, help create the reality that we imagine we merely observe. As John Archibald Wheeler explained, the quantum principle destroys the notion of a world "sitting out there", a world separate from the individual observing it. There is no external observer, but a participant co-creator.⁶⁹ Further testimony derives from Freeman Dyson, who has suggested that the universe shows evidence of mind at three levels--at the level of elementary physical processes in quantum mechanics, at the level of mind and at the level of universal Mind. The implication of the latter, for Dyson, is that we are small elements of God's mental processes.⁷⁰

Henry Margenau, Professor Emeritus of Physics and Natural Philosophy at Yale and theoretician in molecular and nuclear physics, has similarly argued for a universal Mind. He has pointed to the sameness of the properties of the elementary constituents of matter⁷¹ and the fact that oneness exists at the most basic levels of nature. He went on to argue that, if parts thinking has broken down at the level of atoms, then this denial of separability into parts, in its application to the level of consciousness, would make the notion of a universal Mind meaningful, a perspective that Eastern mystics claim has been generated by their experience.⁷²

He went on to contend that each of us is part of God, or part of the Universal Mind. However, the manifestation of this Mind, in us, is limited by factors that obscure all but a tiny fraction of its aspects and properties.⁷³ In developing his hypothesis, Margenau, suggested that this Mind is non-temporal.⁷⁴ He elaborated three additional concepts--the time slit, the personal wall and the stochastic wall. The notion of a "time slit" was intended to indicate that we can only see a tiny slice of the whole panorama of time. The "personal wall" is that which produces within each of us a sense of isolation that gives us an ego and an identity.⁷⁵ The "stochastic wall", from stochos ["target", "aim", "guess"], refers to the randomness and uncertainty of the human condition, which allows for freedom. Margenau went on to contend that the Universal Mind has no time slit or personal wall and that it is not limited by quantum probabilities. Furthermore, he argued, it has no need of memory because everything, past, present and future is open to it. [18] He further suggested that it is the lowering of the personal wall that affords us a greater sense of intimacy with others, evident in spontaneous empathy, prayer, meditation, dreams and extra-sensory perception.⁷⁶

Another interesting explanation of the dynamics of this universal Mind is the controversial theory of morphogenesis suggested by a young plant biologist, Rupert Sheldrake, in the early 1980's. Sheldrake was investigating the question of why two cells, with the same DNA, mature into different parts of a plant. His hypothesis of formative causation was based on the assumption that the human mind is non-local in time and space, non-material and non-energetic. It is not confined to the brain or produced by it.

Sheldrake hypothesised the presence of morphogenetic fields and morphic resonance to explain why certain cells become leaf cells rather than root cells. The DNA, and other chemicals, are what tune these cells into the resonance of certain fields, which are built up, with the passage of time, through what he called patterned restrictions.⁷⁷ Explaining himself, Sheldrake commented, that, while an understanding of the workings of DNA helps explain how organisms acquire the proteins out of which they are built, it does not explain why the organism evolves into a particular pattern and shape, in spite of associated mythico-scientific theories. Sheldrake's alternative explanation, associated with his concept of morphogenic fields, is that the universe, and the creativity that characterises it, can only be explained in terms of something over and above, or transcendent to it, corresponding to the God of religious experience.⁷⁸

Possible confirmation of Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance comes from an experiment conducted by researcher Wayne Doak. Doak, while working with dolphins, had an unusual dream that suggested that he repeat a Maori word meaning "the sound the dolphin makes with its blow-hole" while working with the dolphins. The dream suggested that this would cause the dolphins to perform a specific behaviour. When he next spent time with the dolphins he did as the dream suggested and was surprised, not only by the fact that the dolphins performed as the dream predicted, but also by the additional fact that a friend, working with dolphins some 3000 miles away, reported the same response with the same word the following day.⁷⁹

God?

It is only a short step from universal Mind to God.

Not all physicists make this transition, some because theism is not a personal presupposition, some because they consider that it is illegitimate for them, when involved in scientific research, to smuggle in a factor that is not amenable to scientific verification and some because they do not want to imply that the god they are talking about is to be equated with the god or gods of the various religious traditions, along with their mythological paraphernalia. [19]

Some, however, like the physicist Freeman Dyson, have been more adventuresome. Dyson, who did not make a clear distinction between Mind and God, argued that God was what Mind became when it passed beyond the scale of comprehension. He contended that we are the chief inlets for God at the present stage of the evolution of the planet.⁸⁰

A Quantum Universe

A suggestion, outlined by Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall, corroborates the notion of a Universal Mind, the idea of a universe constituted by an all-embracing Consciousness. They draw attention to the nature of what have been called Bose-Einstein condensates, illustrations of which are superfluids, superconductors and laser beams.

The quantum properties of the Bose-Einstein condensate are both fluidity and a high degree of unity. They differ from glass, in which there is no order or unity among the parts, from gas, in which there is unity but no order and from crystals, in which there is order but no unity. Each indeterminate particle in a condensate fills all the space all the time and the whole acts as one single particle. There is no noise or interference between separate parts.

The authors suggest that consciousness, deriving from a similar firing of the brain's neurones, could furnish the physical basis for human consciousness, which, like other Bose-Einstein condensates, could not be reducible to the sum of their parts. They further argue that this phenomenon is also evident, at a broader level, in society.

They also refer to the "quantum vacuum", of Quantum Field Theory, the ultimate void, heavy with potentiality, from which particles and waves "stand out", as excitations of fluctuations of the vacuum. This fertile Abyss or Emptiness of Buddhism, or the formless-void of Judaic-Christian metaphysics, is, in itself, a type of condensate, perhaps the Primal Condensate. Everything in the Universe, including ourselves and our consciousness, which is a highly developed instance of this Primal Condensate, is a product of and made in the image of the originating Condensate of this Quantum Vacuum. In other words, everything is connected to everything else and God is in everything!⁸¹

Dangers in the Alliance

There are, of course, dangers in looking to science to "prove" God, or in rejoicing too heartily in an alleged corroboration. As John D. Barrow and Joseph Silk argue, on the basis of the fact that our theoretical approximations of reality can never be absolutely accurate, that it would be foolish to rely too closely on a particular scientific opinion or theory, or on science itself, to "prove" God, or to validate the "God" hypothesis.⁸² [20]

Verification

Another of the difficulties associated with trying to demonstrate the existence of God scientifically, or, alternatively, with any attempt to falsify the notion that God exists, is that the exercise is often ill-conceived. It is what Wilber has described as a "category" error, an incorrect matching of categories.

Wilber

According to Wilber, there are three categories of phenomena, each of which is associated with a different human capacity, and, therefore, a different level of experience. The body engages sensibilia, the datum of the senses, the mind, intelligibilia, or products of the intellect, and the spirit, transcendelia, or experiences of transcendent reality.

His point was, that, while it is appropriate to use scientific processes, associated with the hard sciences, to assess truth claims associated with sensibilia, this methodology, when applied to intelligibilia, or intellectual productions, like literature, art, music, metaphysics, is inappropriate. This was where the Logical Positivists, with their peremptory dismissal of all that could not be actually or potentially verified by scientific procedures, were wildly astray. This scientific hubris, generated by excitement over valuable procedures that have brought undeniable benefit to humankind, is dissolving away in the light of the re-configuration of our maps of physical reality, under the influence of developments in quantum mechanics and astrophysics.

According to Wilber, making a judgement about transcendelia, or transcendental experience, is notoriously difficult, because those who have experienced them, and sought to reflect on them, are such a small percentage of the population, and because the experiences, themselves, are beyond our powers of description. If mystics, for whom such intuitive apprehensions are commonplace, try to describe what they experience, they generally use what Wilber refers to as mandalic cartographies, circular visual presentations, symbolic of integration and wholeness. What often happens, as a result of the category error Wilber speaks about, is that transcendelia are dismissed as unreal, imaginative fantasies by those who, while they may be experts in the analysis of sensibilia, have no experience of that which they are investigating.

Wilber further contends that we must develop a more comprehensive model of verification that allows for different, though not utterly dissimilar, methods of verification, appropriate to the three classes of experience--sensibilia, intelligibilia and transcendalia. The model he proposes involved three elements. First, one needs to define what is to be verified [instrumental injunction]. Second, one needs to work out methods of verification appropriate to the level and the phenomena under investigation [intuitive apprehension]. Third, one then needs to identify the community of discourse qualified to confirm or deny the reality of what is being claimed [communal confirmation]. His point, with respect to transcendelia, is that, if [21] we are to investigate mystical experiences, or experiences of transcendence, we must clearly define what is to be verified, we must decide on appropriate methods of verification, including the possibility of replication, and we must identify an appropriate community of discourse qualified to confirm or deny the validity of these sorts of experiences. The latter would be comprised of those experientially familiar with the experiences under review.⁸³

Zollschan

George K. Zollschan, who was both a Jewish Kabbalist and a student and later research assistant of Sir Karl Popper, has made the same point in a different way. Zollschan extended Popper's thesis that human experience can be located in three worlds, the physical, the inter-subjective and the cultural, to include a fourth world, which allows for the creation of symbols. He has argued that it is in this fourth world that one must locate the source of creativity, mysticism, the prophetic and the paranormal, and that the principal connection between this and the other three worlds is free association. He went on to contend that, like the original chaos and formlessness of what were to become the heavens and the earth, in the biblical account of creation, the fourth world is unconstrained by the limits of human thinking and only acquires boundaries as a consequence of interaction with the other three worlds.⁸⁴ He also commented that the fourth world, like "black holes" in space, is inherently veiled and inaccessible.⁸⁵

Contemplatives

Mystics of all traditions have confessed to an intuitive awareness of what Bohm described as the implicate order of reality. Their testimony is consistent, across the religious spectrum. It is these who constitute the community of discourse appropriate for assessing the truth claims of transcendelia. Their combined testimony is that the exploration of the higher reaches of human consciousness yields two foundational insights, first, that everything is related to everything else, and, second, that God is in everything.

The Neoplatonist, Plotinus, almost two thousand years ago, argued that each being contains in itself the whole intelligible world and that it is our urge towards individuality that prevents us experiencing this interconnectedness, and the presence of divinity, within this interconnectedness.⁸⁶

Eastern mystical traditions are full of expressions of the principle of the unity at the centre of the cosmos. The Taoist Book of Chuang Tzu commented that this principle of unity, that was in all things without being identical with them, was unlimited and infinite.⁸⁷ The poet, Yung-chia Ta-shih, similarly suggested that one perfect and all-pervasive Nature circulated through all realities. He argued that it is beyond our control and initiates its own activities. If we hunt for it we lose it. We can neither take hold of it, nor get rid of it. It is when we are silent that we hear it speak.⁸⁸ [22]

Christian mystics have been equally insistent on the interconnectedness of all reality and of the fact that God is within all things as their foundational essence and the ground of their interconnectedness. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) contended that everything is related, connected,⁸⁹ that God has organized everything in relation to everything else⁹⁰ and that the affinity we feel for creatures results from the fact that we discern the presence of God within them.⁹¹ Mechthild of Magdeburg (1210-1280) similarly confessed that her spiritual awakening coincided with a sudden awareness of the fact that God was in all things and that all things were in God.⁹² Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) talked of the Interdependence⁹³ and Relationality⁹⁴ of all things and argued that those who dwell in God live in the eternal now.⁹⁵ He further suggested that those who conceive of the creator as external to the creation are ignorant, as God is in all things.⁹⁶ Further testimony comes from Julian of Norwich (1342-1415)⁹⁷ and from Nicholas of Cusa (1400-1464), who contended that divinity is the enfolding and unfolding of everything.⁹⁸ Even Aquinas argued that God is in the interiority of all things.⁹⁹

This emphasis on the interconnectedness of everything, and of the presence of Mind/Consciousness/Logos/Spirit is all of reality, continues to be reflected in Paul Tillich's notion of Spiritual Presence¹⁰⁰ and in John Macquarrie's existentialist description of God as "Holy Being that lets be."¹⁰¹

Love

If we accept a universal Mind, non-local and non-temporal, in which all things inhere, we must then ask, "What is the nature of this mind?" The almost universal verdict of religious tradition is that it is loving.¹⁰² The essence of this universal consciousness is love. This understanding is at the heart of Christian revelation, which argues that God is Love.¹⁰³

In arguing for a God of love, Christians are confronted by the problem of evil and the knotty issue of theodicy. How can a God of love allow suffering? We will never find an adequate answer to this dilemma. All we can hope to do is to sit with our pain and our perplexity, when we will find, not answers, but a Presence that is with us in our pain.

Most attempts, by Christians, at explaining how a God of love can tolerate evil and permit suffering, turn out to be exercises in special pleading that either detract from the love we predicate of God or else are recognized as being little more than well-intentioned, philosophical sleights of hand.

Jung proposed an interesting solution in his Answer to Job, in which he suggested that the created universe provided God with a means of self-differentiation, of separating and ordering undifferentiated aspects of his being.¹⁰⁴ For Jung, God had a dark side, which the Hebrews, particularly in their early history, did not find an altogether unpalatable idea.¹⁰⁵ Weight could be added to this interpretation by the argument of Howard Bloom, in The Lucifer Principle, that evil is an inevitable by-product of evolution.¹⁰⁶ However, in spite of ambiguity and a recognition of the dark side of reality, [23] this Presence, according to Jung, was predominantly loving. He argued, therefore, that we are both the victims and the instruments of a cosmogonic love.¹⁰⁷

A Contradiction?

It has been argued, through much of this chapter, that the universe betrays evidence of a universal Mind. The tentative description of this reality, particularly by physicists and apophatic mystical theologians, can leave one with the impression of an impersonal, unknowable essence. On the other hand, the testimony of many mystics and prophets, from a range of Eastern and Western religious traditions, is that God is love, a love that is reflected both in affect and action.

These two experiences/perceptions, God as ineffable mystery and God as love, appear to contradict each other. However, this is not necessarily so. Teilhard de Chardin's spoke of two mystical roads, that which discerns what Aldous Huxley calls the "common ground" of all reality and that which promotes a unification with God, which is the effect of love. It can be strongly argued, that these two, seemingly contradictory experiences, are neither evidence of the presence of two different gods nor of the muddle-headed confusion of unearthly mystics, but are, rather, a reflection of the two faces of the one reality. This is certainly what Ninian Smart and Stephen Konstantine suggest, when they argue that there is an unfathomable, unspeakable transcendent side and another side which is full of personal qualities, particularly love and creativity. The first is represented by Gautama, the Buddha, and the second by Jesus of Nazareth.¹⁰⁸

Two Further Challenges

Two further challenges remain to be addressed, the charge that the notion of a Universal Mind or Consciousness is pantheistic and the criticism that the fact that all of reality is indwelt by this Mind, or Consciousness, would preclude any substantial exercise of freedom.

Pantheism

It is difficult to determine what critics mean by "pantheism." My suspicion is that the use, by some, of this word, is the equivalent of a pejorative dismissal of those claiming to discern a Presence inherent in nature, associated with both "primitive animism" and sophisticated Eastern religions. This dismissal is essentially a vestige of the political, cultural, religious hegemony of an earlier colonial era. There is an unscientific arrogance in this casual dismissal, which reflects the rationalism which is both the West's strength and its Achilles heel. It also overlooks the fact, highlighted by Sally McFague, that there are Hebrew and Christian pantheistic traditions,¹⁰⁹ which continue to be reflected in the literature of Christian mysticism. [24]

The difficulty the West has in incorporating this tradition is due largely to a tendency, resulting from a hyper-rationalist orientation, to succumb to the seduction of simplistic dichotomies. One such dichotomy, which has found expression in Christian theology, has been the drawing of a stark distinction between the immanence and transcendence of God. Countering this tendency, Rahner has argued that transcendence can only be adequately understood immanently and that immanence is experienced transcendentally.

The consequence of juxtaposing immanence and transcendence as opposites, which has ostensibly been in the interests of safeguarding God's otherness, has been to extricate God from the material universe to such a degree that the only connection between the two is instrumental. This tendency has also had the effect of reducing God to the category of an existent, to a being who exists alongside other beings. However, as Tillich argued, God, this sort of God, God as an existent, does not exist. He/She is, rather, the source and ground of all existence.¹¹⁰

Gathering up the diverse strands of his argument for a Christian pantheism, Rahner argued that God and the world should not be seen to be connected in a dualistic way. In as far as there is a difference between God and the world, it is God who establishes and is that difference. Furthermore, Rahner argued, God establishes the greatest unity possible within the differentiation. Pantheism, in the sense that there is an element of truth in pantheism, is a sensitivity to the fact that God is the constitutive reality, the original ground and the ultimate term of transcendence. While God is different from the world, this difference is experienced in our original transcendent experience,¹¹¹ which, according to Rahner, is the experiencing of God in the depths of our subjectivity.

Not all Western theologians have wanted to distinguish absolutely between God's immanence and transcendence and to vacuum God out of the creation. Those who have celebrated an immanent creator/sustainer are eloquently represented by Teilhard, who confessed that the world increasingly took on light and fire for him until it became a mass of luminosity.¹¹² Contemporary feminist theologians have also been laying heavy emphasis on an incarnational presence in nature, represented by McFague's daring analogy of the world as "the body of God."¹¹³

Freedom

The second of the questions raised by the positing of a universal Mind pervading an implicate/explicate universe, is the issue of freedom. It has to be asked, given the presence of a universal Mind/Consciousness/Logos/Spirit, whether such a pervasive, preveniently engaged, ordering presence does not preclude the exercise of freedom. [25]

To answer this question, it will be argued that, rather than rendering free action an impossibility, the ubiquity of a universal Consciousness is the necessary ground of human freedom.

Rahner made this point with great cogency. He distinguished between two levels of experience, the transcendent and the categorical, the world of inner transcendent experience and the outer world of everyday decision making. He did not talk so much about two different types of freedom, but rather about the one act of freedom operating at two levels. Put crassly, he suggested that every time we make a decision in the outer world, such as responding to a colleague or disciplining a child, we are, at the same time, deciding to flow with or against a transcendent presence that we experience unthematically in the depths of our being and which is inclining us to respond in ways that will be self-enhancing and will benefit those whose lives will be impacted upon by our decisions. This inner decision, therefore, is a decision to say yes or no to God. As such, it is the foundation of all freedom. It is in flowing with, or pushing against, the pressure of this internally discerned flow of presence and healing intuition, that we, by the exercise of this sort of freedom, constitute ourselves. Freedom, at this level, is constitutive.¹¹⁴

Summary

In this chapter I have attempted to expand the anthropological paradigm on which our attempts at theologizing are based. I have sought to do this by challenging what I have argued are three erroneous assumptions--that we are essentially minds, that action always stems from the rational consideration of alternatives and that we are separate from each other and from other elements in our ecosystem.

I have contended that we are many-faceted body/selves who are continually in the process of self constitution in the context of communities of other selves and of an eco-system which embraces us. Even more importantly, our self constitution is, at an implicate or unthematic level, a discerning of and a learning to flow with this universal loving Consciousness, or Self. [26]

[FOB 6-26]