Virtual Reality and New Age Metaphysics
Faith traditions through history have gotten many things right but have also gotten some things very wrong. In his beautiful little book “Praying a New Story”, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, 2004, Michael Morwood suggests that we need to learn to pray “in” God, not “to” God. He opens us to our place in the “real” world of transformational consciousness.
Intentional consciousness has been long and slow at the work of evolution, an essential aspect of which is self-reflective consciousness. Life tends to do what works in life’s best interest, for the individual and for the community. The power of intention (purpose) is a “virtual” power and a consciousness that has been personified in the individual and in the communal (Trinity). Each is reflective of the other and each is instructive of the other. Virtual power, consciousness, is a universal awareness that governs relationships which are the bases of reality — a reality that is not static but which is perpetually dynamic and evolving.
Throughout its evolution, humankind has gotten many things right virtually and intentionally, subconsciously and consciously. But, humankind sometimes traps itself in dead-end deceptions. Self-deception occurs in fundamental matters of self-reflective consciousness and “virtual reality”. The reconciliation of the virtual and the substantive-real is complicated/implicated, for the conception of reality and reality itself are inseparable and not easily grasped except they are broken down in “parts”. The deconstruction of the virtual (ens rationis, a mental construct) deceives consciousness to think of aspects of reality as real in themselves. In the same way that matter and energy are not separable, so also body and soul, and the spiritual and secular are not separable.
The Protestant Reformation and the Enlightenment, movements arising out of the conflicted imperial Church/State, are about the schism of faith and reason and cumulative worldview fixations that radically divide people of faith and people of reason. Rational enlightenment eschews fideistic religion and religion eschews Enlightenment rationalism (humanism, secularism). For times untold, patriarchy co-evolved with cultures which politicized in imperial hegemony the theology of patriarchy. Until this day the radicalized animus between faith and reason is a schizophrenic, patriarchal consciousness that dominates in personal and public consciousness.
CIVILIZATIONS ARE SCHIZOPHRENICALLY TORN BY THE RADICALIZED ANTAGONISMS BETWEEN VIRTUAL REALITY (FAITH, METAPHYSICS) AND SECULAR REALITY (REASON, PHYSICS).
Unless and until "metaphysical" consciousness and "physical" reality discover their essential mutuality in faith and reason, humankind will continue its self-radicalization in the deceived conceptualizing of Self in Reality. All religions are challenged to reconsider the premises of their theo-logic, for if the premises of their metaphysical logic contain absurdities so do their conclusions.
How can humankind proceed to disrobe itself from its self-woven fabric of deception.
Thank you. I consider myself
Thank you. I consider myself to be in the camp of Richard Rohr, Thomas Merton, John Haught — AND Albert Einstein for his totally new contribution to enLIGHTenment. From my perspective, I date "Second" enlightenment from 1915 (year of the first publication of Einstein's revelations into light and quantum relativity), and continuing. My website, www.secondenlightenment.org, gives access to my rationale and to my out-of-the-box thinking. I happen to believe that the reconciliation of science and religion is not only possible but necessary if humankind would find a way out of the dissonance of conflicted truth yet advanced by their impasse.
I make no pretense of being a scholar of Enlightenment but my passion for reconciliation required me to get a workable knowledge of it. [I am a Louis Dupre reader. I am also a Ken Wilber reader, and I concur with your observations.] So I free-lanced my way into Enlightenment not being that conversant with the "other" Second Enlightenment. I somewhat came to it by the backdoor, which also took me to the root problem, the history of the "divorce" of Faith and Reason, etc. My Second Enlightenment Trilogy books are featured at the website. And I continue to write; most recently a manual for adult faith-sharing "KENOSIS, EUCHARIST and GREEN RELIGION, the Evolution of Social Conscience", which will soon to be available as a free download at the referenced website.
Peace is our pursuit and our prayer. All the best. SLS
"I date "Second"
"I date "Second" enlightenment from 1915 (year of the first publication of Einstein's revelations into light and quantum relativity), and continuing." CORRECTION: should be 1905, not 1915.
I look forward to engaging
I look forward to engaging your writings. I have been a big fan of MetaNexus, the Vatican Observatory, the Center for Theology and Natural Sciences and IRAS -Institute for Religion in an Age of Science, which publishes Zygon. From what you have shared, I know that looking at Reality through your particular peepholes will be rewarding and vision-expanding. I share your enthusiasm for Einstein. Kurt Godel likewise especially gifted me.
Deep peace, SLS.
jb
Shirley Bianchi My high
Shirley Bianchi
My high rating of this forum comes from the fact that I have spent the past 26 years of my life in politics, both as a citizen activist as well as appointed and finally an elected official. I worked with mostly men who believed themselves to be rational, and were about 95% non-believers. In order to be effective I had to never mention that I am a person of intense religious (Catholic) belief, but was required to couch my arguments and reasoning in terms that the rationalists could understand. At first it was exhausting, but over time I became fairly adept at it. The odd result was that over time I realized that what the men wanted, desperately, was to be given an objective reason to express their own unexpressed spiritual values. The above beautifully expressed explanation of what I had experienced in my corner of government so valid.
I leave it up to those more acquainted with the workings of the Church to discuss that. I look forward to the time when/if I will be as acquainted with those workings as well.
Thank you for setting the
Thank you for setting the discussion stage. The honest man must know that he is a puzzlement to himself, particularly if and when he awakens to a true sense of his physical/psychical dependency on femininity, notwithstanding the Garden of Eden Story to the contrary. Patriarchy is a burned-out lucifer. It is long overdue that humankind relegate it to history where it belongs.
Sylvester, I think I get
Sylvester, I think I get your drift. I would describe your essay as a "philosophical lamentation." You thus speak of deceptions, schisms, fixations, the schizophrenic, hegemony, radicalization and such. And, as I see it, many of these absurdities arise from faulty premises that wrongfully treat certain distinctions as dichotomies. (All dichotomies are distinctions but not all distinctions are dichotomies. This seems to get lost on us at times.)
Was it Maritain who liked to say that "we distinguish in order to unite?"
There is no single remedy or one size fits all resolution to philosophical distinctions. Some aspects of Reality DO present as dichotomies. Some dichotomies SHOULD be held in creative tension. Others SHOULD be resolved in dialectical synthesis. Sometimes the principles of noncontradiction and excluded middle must hold and sometimes they must fold --- in order to best capture Reality.
In my view, a robust panentheism does seem to best avoid all of these pitfalls. So, Morwood seems to be on to something in embracing panentheism.
Why, then, say 1) "Prayer is not so much talking to or addressing God, but rather about deepening our awareness that God — the Breath of Life present throughout the universe — comes to visible expression in us." 2) [W]e need to learn to pray “in” God, not “to” God. ???
Panentheism, properly nuanced, maintains the creative tension of the catholic, both-and. Perhaps our liturgical approach does need more balance, but, in my view, we needn't jettison the transcendent when honoring the immanent.
"The deconstruction of the
"The deconstruction of the virtual (ens rationis, a mental construct) deceives consciousness to think of aspects of reality as real in themselves. In the same way that matter and energy are not separable, so also body and soul, and the spiritual and secular are not separable."
This is an important distinction you're making in this thread Sylvester, and as you write at the end of it "all religions are challenged to reconsider the premisises of their theo-logic, for if the premises of their metaphysical logic contain absurdities so do their conclusions." I truly believe that until a more inclusive, relational, metaphysics is developed, religions will be stuck in a visual fog of their own making.
We cannot continue to espouse theological premises which separate the sacred from the profane, the soul from the body, or heaven from earth and earth from hell. The reality is it's all of one piece and it's within each of our individual consciousnesses and reflected by the collective consciousness of the society in which we function/create. Or as Jesus said: 'the Kingdom of Heaven is within.'
My Native American mentors say that until we as individuals break the mirror which reflects our separateness back to us, that we are doomed to live in an isolated state of our own making. Or to use your words, a 'deconstructed state of reality' in which we seek the 'safer'reflection which proves the deconstructive illusion, rather than the 'scarier' meta reality of intertwined inseparable relationships. Or as Jesus said, "As you treat the least of these, so you treat me." He seems to state outright that all and everyone is related and inseparable.
I think what makes the meta reality scarier, is it implies huge responsibility on our part for how we act and think. It's a scary thought to really meditate on how our simplest actions or refusals might effect the whole tapestry.
On an aside, for some reason I decided recently to see if the Church was concerned about the whole New Age movement. I found that it seems to be quite concerned, even going so far as to admit it poses serious challenges, especially to Christology. Interesting given B16's latest book.
Colkoch wrote: >>>This is an
Colkoch wrote: >>>This is an important distinction you're making in this thread Sylvester, and as you write at the end of it "all religions are challenged to reconsider the premisises of their theo-logic, for if the premises of their metaphysical logic contain absurdities so do their conclusions." I truly believe that until a more inclusive, relational, metaphysics is developed, religions will be stuck in a visual fog of their own making.<<<
I think natural theology and metaphysics are worthwhile. I also think that, at this place on humankind's journey, that those projects remain highly speculative. Haldane said that reality is not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we CAN imagine. Chesterton would qualify that, I think, inasmuch as he said that we do not know enough about reality to say that it is unknowable.
In my view, precisely because metaphysics is so highly theoretical, we must take care not to
overreach in its theological application by making sweeping, a prioristic claims in spirituality,
moral & ascetical theology, Christology or in any other disciplines. Our approach should, rather, be more tentative and fallibilist. As I recall, Putnam has evencalled for a moratorium on metaphysics. I might not go that far but, sometimes, I really am put-off by the excessive pejorative force that philosophers seem to employ over against one another.
If so many substance ontologies are too essentialistic and so many process approaches are too nominalistic and so many substance-process approaches are too facilely syncretistic and all of these are too dualistic, does that make nondualism a cure-all? Of course not, it is just the obverse side of the same coin of the metaphysical realm, a coin that has no more purchase on the whole of reality than the others. Might we prescind to a triadic and semiotic approach and make more headway? I don't think so. I've seen just as much overreaching there, too.
What might we do at this point on humankind's journey as we wait for the next best metanarrative?
I think we can safely retreat to common sense and content ourselves with a more phenomenological approach that is not so physicalistic, biologistic, a prioristic, and so many other -istics. If reality is emergent, always yielding *something more/else from nothing but*, then I'm not so sure that any type of reductionistic metaphysical account is going to be that relevant to our human experience.
There are obvious problems with classic dualistic approaches with their concepts that are often mutually occlusive and their competing paradigms that are often incommensurable. This does not mean that nondualism must therefore be the answer. To even use the term is to try to solve a problem with the same mindset that created it. It is just as tautological and question begging. Dualism suffers from causal disjunctions. Nondualism suffers from infinite regress. They both suffer from circular referentiality, embedding their metaphysical conclusions in their definitions and premises. The nondual account is seriously flawed in that it is not robustly relational and does not capture our experience of radical otherness. It also offends common sense in that it does not provide a compelling account of the gap between our essentialist idealizations and our existential realizations. In other words, it has problems accounting for evil, natural and moral, which is to say, for suffering and sin. Suffering is not an illusion. We realize the Kingdom both now AND proleptically.
Much of Buddhist asceticism is geared toward leading one into an experience of nondual awareness. It is NOT about gifting one with ontological information. As such, it is spiritual technology and can be incorporated into any worldview. Merton recognized the distinctions between the existential and theological, immanent and transcendent, apophatic and kataphatic, impersonal and personal. They must be nurtured in creative tension. To resolve them over against one another, or to collapse them in dialectical synthesis, results in an impoverished take on reality.
Colkoch also wrote:>>>We cannot continue to espouse theological premises which separate the sacred from the profane, the soul from the body, or heaven from earth and earth from hell. The reality is it's all of one piece and it's within each of our individual consciousnesses and reflected by the collective consciousness of the society in which we function/create. Or as Jesus said: 'the Kingdom of Heaven is within.'<<<
Tillich drew a distinction between the pseudo-religious, the quasi-religious and the truly religious. As I recall, the pseudo-form focuses exclusively on individual consciousness; the quasi-form on the collective consciousness; the authentic includes both of these but recognizes that we must go beyond them into an additional relationship, which is to say with the truly transcendent.
Colkoch finally wrote: >>>My Native American mentors say that until we as individuals break the mirror which reflects our separateness back to us, that we are doomed to live in an isolated state of our own making. Or to use your words, a 'deconstructed state of reality' in which we seek the 'safer'reflection which proves the deconstructive illusion, rather than the 'scarier' meta reality of intertwined inseparable relationships. Or as Jesus said, "As you treat the least of these, so you treat me." He seems to state outright that all and everyone is related and inseparable. ... I think what makes the meta reality scarier, is it implies huge responsibility on our part for how we act and think. It's a scary thought to really meditate on how our simplest actions or refusals might effect the whole tapestry.<<<
That was so beautifully put. What an honorable heritage and a gift to us all. I like to say that, when we awaken to our solidarity, compassion will ensue.
Deep peace this day,
jb
JB, deep peace to you this
JB, deep peace to you this day. Your cautionary reflection is excellent.
I think you quite accurately call my post a "philosophical lamentation" but I would hope that it is more than that.
The philosophical worry I vent is an appropriate civil lament for our personal agony is a universal tragedy. It is right and necessary that we examine fully the lamentable breach of Faith and Reason, its causes and consequences, for we are personally and socially entangled in webs of our own wrong doing. By entering the entanglement we may discover the reasons of desperation but also redemptive and hopeful reasons. By understanding and acknowledging the weave of self-deception we may discover the "apologia" underlying the rationality of Vatican II, namely, a fundamental insight that goes beyond the desperate theology/politics of Tridentine fideism and Enlightenment rationalism, i.e., evolutionary enlightenment.
As important, if not more important, is movement of public consciousness to a new synthesis of metaphysical reality, and the remedial application of justified living that can bring healing to our blighted souls and global ecologies. Dwelling in retro-reflection can become itself a demeaning pathology if we fail to take the next step, namely, to “Second Enlightenment” insights that mean to heal breaches of Faith and Reason and the cultural desecrations of the Earth-cosmic continuum.
The healing of the rift between Faith and Reason is the sine-qua-non condition of virtual ascent into New Age consciousness and real commitment to equality in human rights and personal self-worth. The full recognition of the mutuality of Faith and Reason might for the first time open civilizations (churches!) to the realization of human potential, free of cultural alienation and egotistic arrogance for power and control over people and Earth-cosmic resources. This, after all, is the mature consciousness Jesus came to in his desert retreat before entering his public life. His example and teaching are held out for all to imitate and emulate. This is Christian Faith. This is cosmic wisdom.
re: any "Second"
re: any "Second" Enlightenment
Fideism and rationalism do persist.
Of course, secularizing the political sphere is necessary in a pluralistic society, but the "First" Enlightenment did run amok on "the Continent" as religion was marginalized not only from the political sphere but also from the social sphere.
In my view, the "Second" Enlightenment began to take hold in the great American experiment, as the founders got it right in the free exercise and nonestablishment clauses of the First Amendment. It also grew in influence through the American trancendentalist movement and the American pragmatist tradition. This is all very consonant with the traditional Catholic understanding of the relationship between faith and reason and is framed in an idiom that is amenable to an inculturated theology (a Vatican II goal tasked to theologians). Google "Donald Gelpi" and you may discover some new and thought-provoking approaches to help remedy what he calls "Enlightenment Fundamentalism," which is precisely the rationalism you and I lament. He offers his own, new, metaphysical synthesis ... that next step you advocate and which I also affirm.
As for using the qualifier, New Age, I find it increasingly problematical. It means too many different things to too many different people. I can discuss any given person's ideas with some rigor once I know their definitions, premises, logical axioms and conclusions. For example, for all that Ken Wilber gets right, in the end, I find his position to be, in places, arational, gnostic and radically apophatic. If that is what one means by "New Age consciousness," then I do not buy it. If, however, one speaks of the body of work of Richard Rohr, who has sometimes been labeled New Age, then I very much embrace his brand of Enlightenment. Same with Thomas Merton. I also embrace the science of evolution and the thought of process-like thinkers, such as John Haught. I think Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett represent the types of rationalistic, Enlightenment fundamentalits we'd both object to, you know, the scientistic cohort. Just to be clear.
Deep peace,
jb