by Dave Pruett
January 16, 2022
The Dilemma
The late cultural historian and Catholic priest, Thomas Berry wrote: “We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are between stories.”
The “we” to which Berry refers is the human race, certainly the Western world. No one with eyes to see can deny that humanity is facing simultaneous existential crises: pandemics, climate instability, aging nuclear weapons on hair triggers, extreme disparities in wealth and power, failed states, and the rise of authoritarianism.
On the other hand, it seems a tad naïve to suggest that these difficulties all stem from a broken story.
When Berry speaks of our “story,” he means our “mythology.” Mythology gets short shrift in Western culture. It shouldn’t. Mythology is what anchors the human soul to the cosmos. It’s the metanarrative that patterns through parables how we ought to relate to our fellow human beings, our fellow creatures, our planetary home, and the cosmos at large, including the Creator. It’s no surprise that things fall apart when we get this story wrong.
When Berry says “we are between stories,” he refers to the tension between established religious mythology and the newer and emerging scientific story.
For centuries, Western humans took comfort from a religious story that went something like this: Humans were created by divine fiat, in the image of God. Thus, we are superior to the other creatures. We occupy the central point—Earth—of a cozy universe consisting of a few planets and a few thousand stars. And Earth is our resource, over which we have “dominion.”
The scientific story burst on the scene in 1543 with the publication of Copernicus’ On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, which upended Ptolemy’s earth-centered cosmology. In the five centuries since, we’ve learned that the universe is anything but cozy. Vast beyond measure, it consists of some 100B galaxies each populated by 100B stars. Nor do we occupy the center of the cosmos. Rather, we exist in an ordinary solar system on one arm of a spiral galaxy, the whole shebang having originated 13.7B years ago in a cataclysmic event called the Big Bang.
Thanks to Darwin, it gets worse. We’re the product not of divine decree but of random mutations operating over eons. And we differ not in kind from the other creatures, only in degree.
Which story are we to believe? It’s like having two parents, one of whom tells us how special we are and the other how ordinary. “Do we really have to make the tragic choice,” asks Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine, “between an antiscientific philosophy and an alienating science?”
Seeing the choice as binary is indeed tragic. Consider the current political polarization and culture wars in the US. Rather than viewing this polarity as conservative vs. liberal or rural vs. urban, it’s perhaps more accurate to see the dichotomy as believers vs. thinkers. Take our pandemic response, for example. Half the country, the thinkers, accepts the science and respects the scientists, gets inoculated, and wears masks. The other half believes either that the pandemic is a hoax, or that God, not vaccines, will protect. Our perceptions of the climate crisis also split along similar lines, hamstringing effective action as the world careens toward climate disaster.
Berry and other modern-day prophets call for a “new,” holistic story, one that is faithful to both the revelations of modern science and to the wisdom of ancient spiritual traditions. I concur and have devoted considerable energy to understanding and explicating that new story, both through an innovative honors course at JMU and in my book Reason and Wonder.
But before outlining the new integrative story, let’s first acknowledge a further tragic aspect of our current dilemma. In one regard, science and religion, historically at loggerheads, have secretly collaborated in a harmful way. By elevating the human to the pinnacle of creation, Judeo-Christian mythology has demoted the natural world—mineral, plant, animal, and planetary—to handmaiden status. Similarly, by its focus on the materialistic aspects of nature, science has ignored—and often belittled—the spiritual essence of all that is. The upshot, reinforced by religion and science, is what cultural historian Richard Tarnas terms the descralization of Nature.
Here then is both the problem and the hint of a solution, again in the words of Berry:
There is a certain futility in the efforts being made to remedy our environmental devastation simply by activating renewable sources of energy and by reducing the deleterious impact of the industrial world. The difficulty is that the natural world is seen primarily for human use, not as a mode of sacred presence primarily to be communed with in wonder, beauty and intimacy. In our present attitude the natural world remains a commodity to be bought and sold, not a sacred reality to be venerated. A deep psychic shift is needed…. Eventually, only our sense of the sacred will save us.
Mystical theologian Matthew Fox puts it simpler: “Without awe, everything is just a commodity.” Our present crises are the end result of commodification in nearly every aspect of our lives and culture: the economy, the media, our fellow human beings, and the biosphere.
The New Story
Our world is desperate for a restoration of the sacred in its broadest sense. What then is this much needed paradigm shift, this “new” story, with which to begin our healing? Again invoking Berry:
The universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.
Take a moment to reflect on this wisdom. When fully realized, the new paradigm will be far more transformative than was the heliocentric cosmology of Copernicus.
Let’s flesh out the outlines of the new story. First, the universe is not just materialistic, a world of particles interacting according to Newtonian mechanics. The universe also has a psychic component. In the words of the paleontologist-priest Teilhard de Chardin: “There is neither spirit nor matter in the world; the stuff of the universe is spirit-matter. No other substance but this could produce the human molecule.”
Second, there is a collective aspect to that psychic component; that is, consciousness is universal. Third, everything within the cosmos, living and non-living, has a conscious face. The universe, to paraphrase Berry, is comprised of Thous, not Its.
To some, panpsychism smacks of animism, often dismissed as pagan. But perhaps the so-called pagans are wiser than we are. So, let’s briefly look at the history of, and the scientific evidence for, the “new” story.
In the 16th Century, in search of a more solid foundation for natural philosophy (what we now term “science”), the French philosopher René Descartes divided the world into two magisteria: in Latin, the res extensa and the res cogitans, that is, matter and mind. To Descartes, only in the human did these camps overlap. Humans alone were conscious. All other entities, including animals, were just machines. Since Descartes, science has focused primarily on the material, mechanical aspects of reality.
But in the 18th-Century, the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant challenged the prevailing philosophy. Kant believed he had launched a second Copernican Revolution by asserting: “It is the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible.” To paraphrase: Consciousness precedes and gives birth to physical reality, not the other way round.
In the 20th-Century, hard-boiled physicists, long steeped in materialism, were dragged kicking and screaming toward the new paradigm. Specifically, quantum mechanics began to chip away at materialistic explanations of reality. First, the discovery of radioactivity in 1895 introduced indeterminism to physics, challenging the fundamental notion of causality. A decade later, in his miracle year of 1905, Einstein equated matter with energy. Moreover, both are quantized. Five years after that, Ernest Rutherford discovered that atoms, the presumed building blocks of matter, were mostly nothingness. Then in 1927, Heisenberg proposed the Uncertainty Principle based upon the observation that light photons behave both as waves and as particles. In 1929, Louis de Broglie won a Nobel Prize for showing that every object also has both a wave-like nature and a particle-like nature. The wave-like nature expresses the object’s tendency to exist when observed.
And on this shoal Descartes shipwrecked. “The very act of observing alters the thing being observed.” Mind and matter are not disjoint.
Finally, in the 1970s came quantum entanglement. What happens to one particle in a pair of twins instantaneously affects the other no matter how large their separation distance. Under such circumstances, physical separation seems illusory.
It was as if the material world dissolved before the very eyes of 20th-Century physicists. Astronomer Arthur Eddington summarized: “… physical science is concerned with a world of shadows …”
The philosophical implications of quantum theory troubled physicists deeply. Nobel laureate Erwin Schroedinger lamented: “If we are going to have to put up with these damn quantum jumps, I’m sorry I ever had to anything to do with quantum theory.”
But one-by-one, most came around to accepting that, to be complete, physics must include psyche. The British thermodynamicist Sir James Jeans concluded: “. . . the stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the Universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine.” Wrote Eddington: “… the stuff of the world is mind stuff.”
Evidence continues to mount that a coherent view of reality must include the primacy of consciousness at all levels of physicality.
Still, most scientists cling to reductionism and materialism. That’s now changing. An unanticipated legacy of the Apollo program was this photograph—“Earthrise”—taken by astronaut Bill Anders aboard Apollo 8. Made possible by the mechanistic science of Newton, the moon landing inadvertently launched a new holistic awareness.
Several Apollo astronauts had mystical experiences during the moon missions. One, Edgar Mitchell, returned home to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). The goal of IONS is to bridge “scientific exploration and experiential discovery to better understand a timeless truth—that humanity is deeply interconnected.” [Emphasis added.]
I’ve been a member of IONS since the 1980s, but I’ve only recently learned of four sister organizations. The first is the Academy for the Advancement of Post-Materialistic Sciences (AAPS). Founded in 2018 after the publication of a white paper signed titled “Manifesto for a Post-Materialistic Science,” AAPS strives to expand the domain of scientific research to the study of consciousness in all its aspects, including those now deemed paranormal.
A second organization to highlight is the Scientific and Medical Network (SMN), founded primarily by physicians and medical workers whose encounters with their patients’ near-death experiences have opened them to a wider view of medical science and healing. The motto of SMN is: “Where evidence-based reason meets deep inner knowing.”
A third organization is the Galileo Commission, launched to expand the scope of science by challenging the adequacy of the materialistic paradigm. And yet a forth is SAND, Science And NonDuality. The noble mission of SAND is “to forge a new paradigm in spirituality … based on timeless wisdom traditions, informed by cutting-edge science, and grounded in direct experience.” SAND recently released a magnificent 1.5 hour documentary titled “The Wisdom of Trauma,” which highlights new therapies for addiction.
During the pandemic, the first four of these organizations have co-sponsored a stunning series of online conferences and lectures, often attended by international audiences of several hundred. I highly recommend these seminars. Witness for yourselves the emergence of a new paradigm, with the sanction of world-class scientists and thinkers.
To summarize: We humans are in a tight race between planetary catastrophe and enlightenment. It’s not clear which will prevail. But the job for each of us is to work toward individual and collective enlightenment. To that end, we need to understand, embrace, and widely spread the new story.
The Fruits of the “New” Story
I’ve been calling this emerging paradigm the “new” story. Truth be told, it’s anything but new. At the beginning of the 20th-Century, the psychologist-philosopher William James made an extraordinary claim:
The truth of things is after all their living fullness, and some day, from a more commanding point of view than was possible to any one in [a previous] generation, our descendants, enriched with the spoils of all analytic investigations, will get round to that higher and simpler way of looking at nature.
James’ prediction—that science would ultimately come around to what is essentially an indigenous worldview—is now being fulfilled. That worldview holds that consciousness exists on a spectrum and pervades all that is.
Consider for example the passphrase of the Lakota (or “Sioux”) peoples of the Great Plains: “mitakuye oyasin.” It translates: “All my relatives.” But the phrase conveys far more. It implies that you and I are related, but also that we are related to all things under creation: the birds of the air, the grasses of the prairie, the worms in the soil, the wind in the air. Even the rocks are brothers.
Similarly among the indigenous people of the African continent is the notion of Ubuntu. The closest translation we have is: “I am because we are.” There is no I without you, and there is no you without me. Not only does it take a community, it takes a universe.
In the Sanskrit, the oldest language on earth, is written: “God sleeps in minerals, awakens in plants, walks in animals, and thinks in humans.” There’s consciousness all the way down.
And in the ancient Upanishads can be found the greatest spiritual truth of all: That art Thou. There is no separation between self and other. Separation is illusion. Each is a unique manifestation of the same Great Oneness.
“You will know them by their fruit,” said Jesus regarding the validity of other teachers. In the same way that a good teacher bears good fruit, so must a good mythology bear good fruit. We know the fruit of the old individualistic, materialistic paradigm: our world is crumbling. What then is the fruit of the new story?
A new economy: As one example, imagine an economy focused on interconnectedness rather than competition. Such an economy would serve the needs of humanity, not vice versa. It would recognize the impossibility of perpetual growth on a finite planet, and the waste of excessive consumption. It would focus on quality of life rather than standard of living and measure what really matters: not GDP but economic justice, well-being, and sustainability. In such an economy, personal success would be defined not by the accumulation of wealth but by one’s contributions to the well-being of all.
Political healing: A story of deep interconnectedness also has the potential to heal the great political rifts of the 20th and 21st Centuries: capitalism vs. communism and the individual vs. the collective. In the name of freedom, in the US we allow individuals and corporations to amass such wealth and power that a greedy few can literally wreck the planet. In contrast, in the old USSR, the individual was crushed, a cog in the collective machine. Both extremes are toxic. To the question of which is more important, the individual or society, Teilhard offered an oxymoron: “union differentiates.” The dichotomy is false. No one is self-made. An individual prospers only in the nurture of a healthy society. And a society cannot be whole and healthy unless it recognizes the unique gifts of each individual and allows that individual to flourish. Recognition of interdependence engenders both reciprocity and individual agency.
In a frank critique of the human species, Teilhard observed: “We are prisoners of our little loves.” Those who can love the birds, like Francis of Assisi, the outcasts, like Mother Teresa, or their enemies, like Jesus, are saints. Individuals who love indiscriminately are rare.
Rarer still are nations capable of setting aside parochial self-interests for the good of the wider human community and the planet we call home. Nevertheless, we must do so. “The age of nations is past,” Teilhard observed. “The task before us now, if we would not perish, is to build the earth.”
Expanding the Circle of Compassion: By emphasizing our connectedness rather than our separateness, the new paradigm expands the circle of compassion. How large should that circle be? To Einstein:
A human being is part of the whole, called by us “universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts, and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a … prison, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
By living too long in technological comfort, bombarded by false narratives and believing that we have mastered Nature, we’ve forgotten our indigenous roots. We have dishonored Mother Earth and we have uprooted our connections to the Earth, to the web of life, and to the Universe at large.
As a result, Homo sapiens sapiens stands at a crossroad never before faced by another species on this beautiful and fragile planet. To survive, we must make a conscious choice to evolve into a higher form. The new human will have both roots and wings: indigenous roots and scientific wings—science and wisdom, reason and wonder.
With what scientific name should the new offshoot of Homo sapiens sapiens be christened? To those who recognize their true nature, that name is clear:
Homo sapiens spiritus
Namaste!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS: Dave is grateful to his late mentor, John Yungblut, for proposing the scientific name of Homo sapiens spiritus for the new human being. He is also grateful for resources from, and delightful discussions with, friends Jim Krag and Barry Hart. Their insights contributed greatly to this essay. And for the balm of encouragement, Dave is indebted to Charlie Finn.