The Last "Great Barrier" Excerpts from a talk by Tom Carney I saw recently a digitized version of the film 2001. It served to remind me that mankind has been trying to figure out what is going on for as long as it has been mankind.... We can go back many thousands, even millions, of years, and we will find some form of Homo sapiens—men and women searching, looking, exploring, and not only, I am pleased to report, for the next best weapon, but most of the time just trying to understand what was happening, or just wanting to see if what was over the next horizon was the same as or different from, maybe even a little bit better than what they presently had. In fact, the history of humanity, what I like to refer to as The Great Unfolding, is really the story of our effort to find out—to find out what is going on here. What is all of this stuff about, anyway? So, if we look back, we can see this unending search for answers in a multitude of areas of human life. But it isn’t the areas of the search or even the answers—which always turn out to be the beginnings of the next question, anyway—that are really of significance. The really significant thing is this force in us, this media not only within and through which we live and move, but likewise which lives and moves within and through us. Thinkers from Plato to Whitehead have noted this force. This force—what it is, how it works, and what our relationship as humans to it should be—makes up a major part of every spiritual text like the Bible or Bhagavad Gita that we have; and it was also a major aspect of the oral message of every spiritual leader—regardless of race, or time, or religious persuasion or geographical location—of whom we have a record. One of my favorite names for this media is élan vital. A 19th century French philosopher, Henri Bergson, coined this term, and it means the original vital impulse, the substance of consciousness and nature. I think of this force as something more, however, than simply a free-floating all-pervasive energy field. I think of this élan vital as the Will to Be. This is a Principled and Purposed Will. It is Life itself... In us it takes the form of a driving urge, a wanting to know, an absolutely needing to know: What lies ahead? What does it mean? Where did it come from? Where does it go? Can you imagine what it must have been like some umpteen millions of years ago, while crouched in terror under a rock ledge, and clutching your leg bone weapon, you watched lightning come out of the sky? The need to know what it was and where it came from must have driven some of us up into the mountains in search of those answers. Who knows what we found up there? This same force drives us today. This drive is, to me, a primary signature of humanity, and the guarantee, even if we do not now know what it will look like, of our eventual triumph. Humanity will persist until it gets there, wherever "there" turns out to be, and when we arrive, we will know it... Searching, looking, this is the dharma of humanity, and it is within this dharma that we discover ourselves.  After Many Lives Of Looking ...after climbing for eons among the unending branches of the tree of knowledge and after being ultimately unsatisfied with the answers we find...the irresistible drive that is our signature turns us in, turns us finally, from the "out there" spaces to the "in here" spaces. The inner search begins.  Very frequently, this shift is signaled by a shift in concern. The concern for one’s self subtly and gradually diminishes. It is equally subtly and gradually replaced by a concern for the welfare of others. In this transition, the man or woman moves on to the most challenging trail ever encountered... This Path will lead, ever upward, ever inward, through many obstacles and barriers, eventually back to the "no place" which we call the Father’s House... To read this article in its entirety please go to Arcana Workshops website: http://www.meditationtraining.org/thoughtline/tl-2000-06.doc

 

Publisher's Muse: Spirituality & Science - The Future By Kevin Sharpe A look at what lies ahead for the science-religion dialogue as it absorbs the encounter with non-western thought, growing secularization, and our increasingly individualized search for spirituality.

copyright©Bryon Allen

...The barriers upholding the unquestioned power of religion will come down, replaced by an acceptance of a questioning attitude, with ever-deeper delving into the historical and political background of "holy" traditions. This change will not be destructive in its essence, but instead will be a constructive process of gaining knowledge and increasing understanding.

A recent Gallup Poll finds that:

Most people in the U.S. think of themselves as religious, but 30 percent called themselves "spiritual but not religious."...

...Though at one time Catholics thought themselves possessors of the only true religion, the process of ecumenism–with the Second Vatican Council–has changed them. The process of science and religion will see a similar change in attitude in some of the righteous religions. In the United States and in Europe, as greater religious varieties enter a nation’s makeup, the less turmoil erupts over religion. The U.S. now leans away from the term "melting pot," because that doesn’t really happen. People often retain many of their traditional activities and beliefs. We don’t all become the same. The United States more appropriately resembles a "salad bowl": each tradition keeps its characteristics, with the overall blend complementary...

Science, being "objective," sets the pace for looking at ideas in a certain light, just as the ecumenical movement did. It creates a state of mind that is more objective and less subjective. This in turn opens up a different attitude in looking at religion. With this more open, more searching, more reflective quality in persons, a greater sense of cooperation and sharing of common ideas emerges. It will have an overall effect–one for the better–on our definitions of religion, science, and spirituality. It will push the boundaries of science and religion as we know it now.

Spirituality and its Effects

...Along with the decline of traditional religion and its churches, synagogues, mosques, and other holy places, there will come an increase in individual spiritual awareness. This is related to but not bound by traditions whose powers are failing in the west. Secularization will not weaken people’s hunger for spirituality, nor their sense of wonder and exploration; it will simply point them in different directions.

...The scientific issues addressed by this growing spiritual awareness might not be the same as the "hot button" topics that dominate the discourse today. For example, theologians now often call upon the "anthropic principle" of cosmology to defend their belief in a God of purpose; but in the future, it is likely that this concept–if it survives–will become less of an assertion of religious particularity and more of an expression of the oneness of the universe, its utter interconectedness...

To read this article in its entirety please go to: 

Publisher's Muse: Spirtituality & Science - The Future

on the Science and Spirit web site at www.science-spirit.com/

He who works with his hands is a laborer.
He who works with his head and his hands is a craftsman. 
And he who works with his head, hands and heart is an artist.
St. Francis

"I can measure my life by the moments when art transformed me.... "It can happen anywhere, anytime.... Art can work its magic  any time you are in the presence of a work created by someone who has gone inside the act of creation to become what they are creating.  When  this takes place time stands still and if our hearts are open to the experience,our spirits soar and our imaginations fly unfettered.  "You need these moments if you are ever to have a life that is more than the sum of the daily moments of humdrum affairs....    "Once you love an art enough that you can be taken up in it, you are able to experience an echo of the great creative act that mysteriously has given life to us all. "It may be the closest any of us can get to God." Kent Nerburn,  Letters to My Son © 1994 New World Library, Novato, CA

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance
of things, but their inward significance.   Aristotle

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Scientists have been searching for human intelligence for generations. Now a team of British and German scientists believe they have identified a specific area of the human brain responsible.                                                                               

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"The highest Art is that which by an inspired use of significant and interpretative form unseals the doors of the spirit."                                                                         Sri Aurobindo

What Are Noetic Sciences? by Willis Harman                                                                     "Perhaps the only limits to the human mind are those we believe in"   copyright©Lucette Bourdin    A new science is arising, a science of the human mind much broader than psychology has been to date. We have called it "noetic" science, after the Greek word for intuitive knowing...It is the second stage of a two-stage process. The first stage, the rise of modern materialistic science, is one of the most important evolutionary leaps in human history. Its essence embodies a remarkable proposition, namely that knowledge of the objective sense-perceived world should not be based on religious or traditional authority, nor the guarded property of an elite priesthood, but should be empirically based and publicly verifiable, open and free to all...  The goal of the second stage...is creation of a similar body of knowledge, empirically based and publicly validated, about the realm of subjective experience...For the first time there is hope that this knowledge can become — not a secret repeatedly lost in dogmatization and institutionalization, or degenerating into manifold varieties of cultism and occultism — but rather the living heritage of all humankind. It is the esoteric core of all the world's religions...becoming exoteric, "going public." As Aldous Huxley describes this "perennial wisdom," it "recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds ... finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality ..." ...A noetic science — a science of consciousness and the world of inner experience — is the most promising contemporary framework within which to carry on that fundamental moral inquiry which stable human societies have always had to place at the center of their concerns. We do well also to recall that it was this nation more than any other in recent times which has clearly — at its inception — given this knowledge the capstone position, as symbolized by the All-seeing Eye in the Great Seal on the back of the dollar bill... ...there is widespread recognition of the need for deeper understanding of our spiritual nature and of the essential goals and characteristics of a workable humane society. To read this article in its entirety go to this page on the Institute of Noetic Sciences website: http://www.noetic.org/ions/about/harmanarchive.asp Reprinted from IONS Newsletter, Vol. 6, No. 1, Spring 1978. Willis Harman was president of the Institute of Noetic Sciences from 1978 until his death in 1997.

"God as Architect", by William Blake      Art and Spirituality   by Veronica Brady   Genuine spirituality, like art, is open and dynamic...both are the hope of a world so badly in need of transformation "The world is charged with the glory of God It will flame out like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness like the ooze of oil Crushed.  Why do men then not reck his rod?"[1] Spirituality is at once very simple and very misunderstood.  As these lines by Gerard Manley Hopkins tell us, the world is "charged with the glory of God", shot through with beauty and terror.  But all too many of us are blind to this, preoccupied with what D H Lawrence called "the business of money-making, money-having and money-spending", and the pursuit of power and pleasure, "distracted by distraction from distraction". ... As I see it spirituality is not something apart from everyday life.  It is an experience that occurs in the midst of, and gives depth and integrity to our lives as people ...  As one writer puts it, it holds "on to the 'spark' that glows beneath all deep structures, beneath all social structures and beneath all physical existence, and which catches fire in communication with a divine nucleus of existence."[2] ...By definition therefore, spirituality involves challenge and transformation and is thus the opposite of belief in a 'God' who is in effect the projection of our emotional, social and even political needs.  ...Media society depends on the manufacture of mass imagery dedicated to a culture of consumption and instant gratification, "the exaltation of signs based on the denial of the reality of things."[This is why art offers a way to a genuine spirituality...  art should be an affirmation of life, not an attempt to bring order...but simply a way of waking up to the very life we are living, which is so excellent, once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of the way and lets it act of its own accord.[6] ...What makes a major artist, I would submit then, is the sense of self and life as dialectical, not one dimensional, open to the interplay of what... cannot ever be fully put into words...   Art reminds us that life is stranger, more beautiful, demanding, joyous and painful than common sense knows.  The holy then, is mysterious...  Far from being unworldly or abstract, this mystery exists in the midst of our lives as a wonderful passage in Margaret Attwood's Alias Grace makes clear.  Grace comes into the kitchen early in the morning. There was a strange light, as if there was a film of silver over everything, like frost only smoother like water running thinly down over flat stones; and then my eyes were opened and I knew it was because God had come into the house and this was the silver that covered heaven.  God had come in because God is everywhere, you can't keep him out, he is part of everything there is.[9] ...So a genuine spirituality, like art, is open and dynamic, opening out truer possibility.  In this sense both are the hope of a world so badly in need of transformation. To read this article in its entirety please go to the New Renaissance website and this page:  http://www.ru.org/81brady.html Sister Veronica Brady is a writer and commentator on media, culture and social issues.  She is an associate Professor in the Department of English, The university of Western Australia. This article was published in New Renaissance magazine Vol. 8, No. 1 (c) 1998 Renaissance Universal, all rights reserved.

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