Bede Griffiths invites us to look afresh at Christianity

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

On the back cover of the book called A New Vision of Reality it says that:

 

" In this major new work Bede Griffiths invites us to look afresh at Christianity

in the context of modern physics on the one hand and Eastern mysticism on the

other. Scientists now acknowledge that quantitative enquiry can reveal only one

aspect of reality and that to come to terms with a much deeper transcendent

reality we must be prepared to learn from Eastern traditions. The Western

mechanistic model of the universe, dating from the time of Galileo and Newton,

must now be replaced with a new organic model - this marks a return to the

ancient traditional wisdom in which the universe was seen to consist not only of

a physical dimension but also of psychological and spiritual dimensions, all of

which are interrelated and interdependent. "

 

[The blurb states that Griffiths in the writing of this book, seeks to discover

the basic unity which underlies all religion]:

 

" In exploring " the divine mystery behind human life " Griffiths seeks to discover

the basic unity wich underlies all religion and discusses the concept of the

Cosmic Person or Cosmic Lord as revealed in Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and

Islam. He concludes with a radical vision of a new society and a universal

religion in which " the essential values of Christianity will be preserved in

living relationship with the other religious traditions of the world " .

 

[Who is Bede Griffiths?]:

 

BEDE GRIFFITHS, formerly a Benedictine monk at Prinknash Abbey and Prior of

Farnborough Abbey, left England in 1955 to travel to India to assist in the

foundation of Kurisumala Ashram, a monastery of the Syrian rite in Kerala. In

1968 he moved to Saccidananda Ashram in Tamil Nadu by the sacred river Cauvery.

This ashram (founded in 1950) was a pioneer attempt to found a Christian

community in India which would incorporate the customs of a Hindu ashram and the

traditional forms of Indian life and thought. It seeks to become a centre where

people of different religious traditions can meet together in an atmosphere of

prayer. "

 

i hope that Bede Griffiths' writing will open up new vistas on the landscape of

our understanding, regarding the essential unity of all religions.

 

Enjoy!

 

violet

 

 

The New Physics, the New Biology and the Evolution of the Material Universe

 

(p.9)The world today is on the verge of a new age and a new culture. Over a

period of nearly three centuries in the West the philosophy of materialism has

come to permeate every level of society. This materialist philosophy may be

explicit, as in Marxist dialectical materialism, or it may be implicit, as it is

in most Western scientific theory and above all in popular thinking. So

pervasive has it been that most people in one way or another have come under its

influence. This fundamental materialist philosophy arose from an understanding

of the universe which was based on a mechanistic model. The development of this

mechanistic understanding can be traced in the Western science of the last three

centuries.

 

As an interpretative model in science it prevailed until the present century,

and in certain quarters it is still strongly supported. In the last hundred

years however, and mainly in the last fifty, it has been radically undermined by

a new understanding of science and particularly by new physics. Fritjof Capra's

The Tao of Physics (1975) did much to awaken public attention to the

breakthrough, while in a later book, The Turning Point (1982), Capra showed how

this new vision of the universe affects not only physics but also biology,

medicine, psychology, sociology, and economics. We are, Capra asserts, on the

verge of a paradign shift. A new vision of reality is penetrating the scientific

world.

 

(p.10)Another element in the change of paradigm is in psychology. Western

psychology, which began with Freud on an entirely materialistic basis, has now

begun to open up. The first stage was through the work of Jung, who introduced a

more spiritual aspect, but recently it has developed much further with the

emergence of transpersonal psychology. This new area within psychology has begun

to discover and explore levels of consciousness far above or beyond normal

mental consciousness. At this point Western psychology has begun to open itself

to oriental thought and to Eastern psychology. We are now reaching an

understanding not only of the conscious and unconscious levels of mind but also

of a whole " spectrum of consciousness " as Ken Wilber calls it. Wilber is

prominent among the new transpersonal theorists and is one of the leading

authorities on this range of psychological development. He traces the stages of

development from the elementary psychology of the child and of primitive man,

right through to the supreme consciousness, which is the awareness of Ultimate

Reality as known in Hindu and Buddhist mysticism. So the whole horizon has

opened up vastly in the last century, from a very limited materialist philosophy

of life to a philosophy based on science and psychology but open now to the

whole transcendent reality of existence as known both in the East and in the

West.

 

Until the sixteenth century there was a universal philosophy not only in Europe

but also throughout the civilised world. This is usually referred to in the West

as " the perennial philosophy " . It was found in China in the development of

Taoism and Confucianism which came to a head in the neo-Confucianism of the

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in India in the development of Vedanta; in

the rest of Asia in Mahayana Buddhism; in Islam in both the philosophical

development of Islam and in Sufism; and finally in Europe in the whole

development of medieval (p.11) Christianity. This universal wisdom, or perennial

philosophy, prevailed from about AD 500 to about AD 1500 and is part of our

inheritance. It was based on the belief in a material world which was studied

scientifically with considerable accuracy, although of course modern science has

gone far beyond its limited achievements. What was distinctive about the

universal wisdom was its understanding that the material world was pervaded by,

and would find its explanation in, a transcendent reality. This transcendent

reality was known in China as the Tao, in Mahayana Buddhism as the Void, the

'Sunyata', in Hinduism as the Brahman, and in Islam as 'al Haqq', the Reality.

In Christian doctrine it was known as the Godhead (as in Dionysius and Eckhart)

or simply as the Supreme Being. In this there is to be found a universal

philosophy which is the inheritance of all mankind. For various complex reasons

this philosophy began to be gradually undermined in the Europe of the sixteenth

century. Widespread developments took place at that point and the new

materialist philosophy began to emerge, coming to a head in the nineteenth

century.

 

Materialism has become a major component of our inheritance and all our

attitudes to life are determined, at least partially and very often

unconsciously, by a materialist view of reality. What is needed now is to

discover that we are conditioned in that way and to move on to recover the

elements of the more universal and profound vision, within the context of the

scientific thought of today. It is very significant that the new physics and

other branches of the new science are helping us to get a renewed vision of

reality which takes us back to aspects of the ancient wisdom, and in the process

assists the development of our new vision in even more profound and far-reaching

directions. What is now important is to see how Christianity accords with this

new paradigm in science. In the course of examining this it (p.12) will become

apparent that the new paradigm affects in many ways our Christian understanding

of the world.

 

Modern materialist philosophy began with Descartes. It had been evolving over

several centuries from the Aristotelian philosophy which had long dominated the

Western world. Aristotelism had come to prevail for at least five centuries not

only within Christianity but also in Islam. The great Muslim philosophers,

Avicenna and Averroes, were both Aristotelians. The medieval thinkers and

theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and Duns Scotus, were all basically

Aristotelian philosophers. What is characteristic of Aristotelian philosophy is

the belief that human knowledge is based on the evidence of the senses. It was

this understanding which came to dominate philosophy after the sixteenth century

to the exclusion of the more profound view of Plato. In the fourteenth and

fifteenth centuries Aristotelian philosophy began to take a new direction. It

was this new understanding which emerged into full light in the sixteenth

century and began the path of a new philosophy which eventually became the

materialistic philosophy we know today.

 

Descartes was a key figure in the development of materialism in that he was the

first to make a complete separation between mind and matter. In Aristotle mind

and matter, or form and matter, were considered to be always interdependent in a

dynamic interrelationship. The human being was a body-soul. The soul for

Aristotle was the form of the body, so that the human being was an integrated

whole. Descartes's understanding was radically different in that he separated

body and mind, and maintained that matter, including the body, is reality

extended outside of us, 'res extensa', totally separate from mind. The mind is,

as it were, an observer which looks out on this universe extended outside of us.

Descartes was a great mathematician and he believed that through mathematics one

could come to a (p.13) perfect understanding of the universe. The whole universe

was to him a mechanism governed by mathematical law. Once the laws of

mathematics had been discovered the whole material universe could be known.

Within this system each individual person was a separated entity, a 'res

cogitans', a thinking reality, over against material reality, 'res extensa'. The

Cartesian view, then, continued to feed into Western thought operating with two

separate realities, 'res cogitans' and 'res extensa', mind and matter. This

separation of mind from matter marks the beginning of all modern philosophy.

 

A second stage which was very important in this development was the work of

Francis Bacon, the English philosopher, who saw the value of its main features

for practical purposes. He was one of the first to declare that the goal of

science is not simply to understand the universe but to control it. This meant

using mathematical and scientific knowledge to change nature and to reconstruct

matter. The whole of modern technology flows from the idea that by the

scientific enterprise not only can the structure and properties of matter be

understood but this knowledge can be applied for practical purposes.

 

There is no need to say how profound the effect of all this has been. It has

transformed our world, giving us a different understanding of the universe and

vastly changing the condition of human life through technology. But on the other

hand this development had grave defects which have only gradually come to light.

 

The next stage was that of Galileo, who is famous for his discoveries in

astronomy and who was also a mathematician and philosopher of science. Galileo

maintained that matter itself had to be studied only in its quantitative aspect.

Mass and motion were the main characteristics of matter and these could be

measured quantitatively. The understanding grew that the only real knowledge is

that which can be measured and therefore mathematically understood. All else

(p.14) is subjective. Matter is extended substance, res extensa, obeying

mathematical laws. Being quantitative it can be known only by quantitative

methods. Beyond that all sense qualities, sight, sound, touch, taste, smell, and

even more, all emotional aspects of life, all art, morality and religion, were

considered to be purely subjective. The extended mathematical system represented

the only objective reality. Moreover, the whole of this reality was seen as an

exclusively mechanical system. At that time many new types of clock were

appearing and the clock seemed to be the most appropriate model of reality. A

clock could be built as a more or less perfect mechanism, and on the model of

the clock the universe as such was assumed to be a perfect mechanism. Further,

once the working of the mechanism was understood, it could be controlled and

used. That was the fundamental idea and from it arose modern technology.

 

The next stage developed with Isaac Newton, whom some consider the greatest

scientist that ever lived. Newton built an understanding of the universe,

complete as far as it went, which was so successful that until the present

century it was accepted by all scientists. It was a marvellous achievement, for

it really showed how the universe worked as a system in terms of the mechanisms

with which he was concerned. But it was also crude in a sense, because for

Newton matter was extended in space, and reality consisted of concrete objects

moving in space and time. Measurement of mass, motion and other properties, and

their interrelationships, provided the model of the universe for the succeeding

centuries.

 

It must be remembered, however, that both Descartes and Newton were Christians

with a definite belief in God. For Descartes, although the matter of the

material universe was extended substance without mind, man himself, or rather

the mind of man, possessed knowledge by what Descartes called " innate ideas " .

Ideas did not arise from (p.15) matter; they arose in the human mind as innate

ideas which came ultimately from God. In Descartes's view God was the supreme

reality who enlightened the mind of the scientist, enabling him to explain the

material univere.

 

Newton's position was even more interesting. He was a great philosopher and

theologian, and many so-far unpublished manuscripts of his have been discovered

in which he explores elements of the paranormal. He was very interested in

alchemy and astrology, as Richard Westfall shows in his Never at Rest (1980),

and his vision of the universe was profoundly religious. He believed that it was

God who had created the universe and that God continues to pervade it. It was

the presence of God which constituted space and time and which ordered the

motions of material objects. In itself it was an extremely interesting system.

The sequel, however, was this. In the eighteenth century the Newtonian system

was not only accepted in physics but became the standard for science generally.

Because the method of Newtonian mechanics was so highly successful and yielded

such impressive results it became extrapolated into metaphysics. It was assumed

philosophically that Newtonian physics provided not only a complete picture of

reality but the only picture of reality. The result was that everything that was

not amenable to measurement by Newtonian methods was systematically excluded

from consideration. Theology, ethics and aesthetics, for instance, were dropped

from this new world view. Descartes, Bacon and Newton were not materialists as

such. All believed in God as the supreme reality governing the universe. In fact

in Newton's case the irony was that philosophically he himself was not a

mechanist at all; he believed the universe to be a body, an organism, rather

than a machine.

 

But by the eighteenth century these aspects of reality had been eliminated and

the mechanistic system alone remained. Thorough-going materialism, then,

combined with (p.16) mechanism, was the philosophy which prevailed into and

during the nineteenth century. It was gradually extended from inorganic matter

(as in physics and astronomy) to include life and life processes. Biological

science went ahead to attempt to explain life and living phenomena in terms of

mechanical causality, using the concepts of physics and chemistry. It must be

said that at the present time this development in the form of modern molecular

biology and palaeontology, coupled with neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory, has

been enormously successful. Molecular biology has made extraordinary discoveries

about the nature and function of genetic material, for instance, and in the area

of genetic engineering immense new visions have opened up, all within the

framework of this mechanistic system. Life itself, then, came to be explained

exclusively in terms of mechanism.

 

The next stage in this development was in the sphere of psychology. In cosmology

and the natural sciences generally the existence of a God was no longer

necessary, and now in psychology the existence of a soul was considered

superfluous. The whole human being could be explained in terms of mechanistic

causality. The great pioneer in this work was Freud. He had been trained in

neurology and his original idea was that all human psychology could be accounted

for in terms of neurochemistry, the chemistry of the nervous system. He

gradually transcended that view but always retained this basically mechanistic

model. Freud was the first to explore the unconscious, and it is one of the

great pioneering discoveries of modern times that there is a whole world of the

unconscious beneath the conscious experience of the mind. Freud maintained,

however, that the unconscious was governed by mechanistic laws and he explained

the process in terms of forces. Just as there are forces in nature which move

the various bodies in the world, so there are forces in the unconscious, in the

form of instincts and (p.17) impulses, appetites and desires, which move the

human being.

 

In particular, Freud discovered that many of these appetites and desires

resulted from repressed feelings. Repression, by the conscious part of the mind,

of desires, emotions and sexual feelings resulted in these repressed elements

becoming forces in the unconscious which drove the person to action, and could

account not only for human action but also for the processes of human thought.

All human thought, all knowledge, all morality and all religion could thus be

explained in terms of these forces in the unconscious. Freud's disciple Jung,

however, broke with Freud on this issue, and discovered in the unconscious not

only repressed emotions and desires but also creative principles which he called

archetypes. These were formative principles in the unconscious which opened the

human mind to other levels of reality. From this Jung was led to conceive the

" collective unconscious " as the repository of the inherited experience of

humanity, manifesting itself particularly in dreams and in the myths of ancient

man.

 

In spite of the prevailing materialist philosophy, developments in contemporary

science are arising which support the basic principles of the " perennial

philosophy " . In physics, for instance, there has recently been the discovery

that the material universe is essentially a field of energies in which the parts

can only be understood in relation to the whole. A related and most profound

idea which has been introduced in physics is that the whole is in some way

present in every part and, further, that every part is interconnected with every

other part. This principle applies to the whole universe and everything in it.

In physics the nature of the electron itself exemplifies this. The electron is

spoken of in terms of a wave-function which is information about the probability

of locating the electron in a certain area of space. That wave-function spreads

out to fill the entire (p.18) universe, so that a certain electron which is

identifiable as being at point x has a very tiny fraction of itself spreading

billions and billions of light years away. Further, the electron which is here

at point x is also the product of all the other billions and billions of

electrons that fill the universe. One of the interesting consequences of this is

that if the physicist tries to contain this electron by, say, building a box

around it, this cannot be done completely because the electron has part of

itself extending outside the box. The effect of that is the so-called Tunnelling

Process or Tunnelling Effect whereby, after a little while, the electron will

defy all the forces that attempt to hold it and will gradually 'leak' out,

tunnelling through the wall. It transcends itself, in a sense, to fill the

entire universe. The Tunnelling Effect is well verified experimentally. It is

common in modern technology and is a central idea in contemporary quantum

mechanics.

 

The discovery that the whole is present in every part and that within the whole

all parts are interconnected has been further corroborated by the work of the

physicist, David Bohm. Bohm is a good example of a modern physicist who is open

to the spiritual dimension of reality, and is known as a disciple of

Krishnamurti. As a physicist Bohm is well-known and well-respected and his

philosophical theories are based on his work in physics, but at the same time he

is exploring spiritual reality through meditation and other spiritual practices.

Particularly important is his introduction of the theory of the implicate order

(Wholeness and the Implicate Order, 1980). According to Bohm's theory the whole

universe is originally implicated, or folded up together, and what we observe in

the everyday world is the explicate order, i.e. that which has been explicated

or unfolded. The implicate order is continually unfolding, becoming explicate.

But behind the explicate order the implicate is always present, so in that sense

the whole universe is implicated behind every explicit (p.19) form. This has

extraordinarily interesting results. It is held now that the universe came into

being about fifteen billion years ago with what is known as the Big Bang, an

explosion of matter at an extremely high temperature. Even in that original

explosion, which could best be described as an explosion of energy in the form

of light in which there were as yet no forms, all the atoms and molecules,

organs and organisms of the whole universe were already implicit, from the very

beginning. This does not mean that particular forms were pre-determined. Rather,

there was an infinite potential present in the very origin of the universe and

one aspect of that potential came to be actualised at each moment of

development. In other words, the universe could have developed along a whole

variety of different potential routes and we perceive only one of those possible

pathways. Because the explicate universe is unfolding from the implicate order

where all possible interconnections are latent, everything at the level of the

implicate order is interrelated. This means that we are living in a universe

which is co-ordinated and integrated as a whole. And that opens up a new vision

of reality. It needs to be added that this new aspect of Bohm's work is

essentially philosophical though at the same time it relates to experimental

physics. In fact the theory of the implicate order is in the same philosophical

tradition as that of Einstein. Einstein was particularly disturbed by the

philosophical implication of quantum mechanics that the world, at the sub-atomic

level at least, is by its very nature unknowable. Bohm is affirming, in the

spirit of Einstein, a fundamental wholeness, interconnectedness and

intelligibility.

 

Another rapidly-moving area in the new science is that of biology, where an

important set of ideas have been advanced by the Cambridge biologist Rupert

Sheldrake. Working in the forefront of theoretical evolutionary biology,

Sheldrake published in 1981 a book entitled A New Science of Life: The (p.20)

Hypothesis of Formative Causation in which he maintains that the attempt to

explain the phenomena of life in terms of physics and chemistry alone cannot

ultimately succeed. Molecular biology is extremely successful at the moment at

its own level of operation but, Sheldrake holds, it is simply not adequate to

explain the main features of life, in particular the process of morphogenesis,

the development of new forms of life, and their regulation and regeneration.

Sheldrake's contribution here has been the introduction of a theory of

" formative causation " based on the hypothesis of morpho-genetic fields. The

theory that has prevailed up to now is basically neo-Darwinian and it asserts

that the evolutionary development of living organisms is to be accounted for in

terms of random mutations, Mendelian genetics and natural selection. Monod, the

French Nobel laureate, speaks for his colleagues in molecular biology in his

recent work Chance and Necessity (1972), and the account he gives is an explicit

statement of this thoroughgoing mechanistic position. There are many features of

the natural world, however, that this mechanistic theory does not explain. How

is it, for example, that electrons, protons and so on are organised into an

atom? How is it that atoms are organised into molecules and again into more and

more complex molecular structures? How is it that molecules are organised into

increasingly complex forms in the living cell? How are cells organised into more

and more complex forms, into plants, into animals and into the human body?

Higher levels of organisation arise by constant development of increasingly

complex forms. Sheldrake's thesis is that, although there are fields of energy

in the universe, the universe cannot be explained in terms of energy alone;

there has also to be formative power. This formative power exists as

non-physical, non-energetic fields which Sheldrake calls " formative causes " or

" morphogenetic fields " . The Greek word 'morphe' means a form, hence

" morphogenetic " is that which produces forms. With this (p.21) theory Sheldrake

has reintroduced a notion very similar to that of Aristotle who held that the

universe is made not merely of matter but of matter and form. In Aristotle's

understanding matter is potential energy. It has no existence in itself; it is

the potentiality to exist. Matter is structured by what Aristotle called form,

'eidos'. The Greek word 'eidos' meant first a form in the literal sense, the

shape of a tree or an animal or anything else, and then it came to mean the

organising power of the tree or the animal. So there is matter which is

indeterminate and unstructured, which is the source of all the indeterminacy and

the unpredictability of the material world. This is observable; there is an

element of sheer chance, in matter. But the indeterminate and unpredictable does

not explain the universe. It had to be recognised that matter is being organised

by form or, in Sheldrake's terms, by morphogenetic fields. Sheldrake introduces

here the concept of morphic resonance. This means that each living or non-living

entity develops its particular form as a crystal or organ or plant or animal

because it is within a particular morphogenetic field which is structuring it,

and which is in resonance with all similar organisms. The field thus contains an

inherent memory.

 

To illustrate the difference between the mechanistic view and his own position

Sheldrake uses the analogy of a radio. The radio is a mechanistic system and it

has to be in working order, but when the mechanism is correctly set up it works

by being tuned into events from outside. The materialistic view would be that

everything can be explained in terms of the mechanism of the radio. If, for

instance, you were to take a radio to a primitive tribe in Africa and play it to

the people, they might well think that the voices they were hearing were coming

from the radio set itself. What is more, they would be able to prove it because

the moment the set went wrong the voices would stop and as soon as the set

(p.22) was repaired the voices would come on again. So it would be all too easy

to conclude that the voices could be explained in terms of the mechanism. In the

mechanistic model of the universe it is quite true that when the mechanism goes

wrong, when for instance the brain fails, then the mind stops acting, but that

does not mean that the mind can be reduced to the brain, or, in the case of the

phenomenon of the voices, that the voices can be reduced without remainder to

what happens inside the radio. Rather, the signals giving rise to the voices

come from outside the radio and are of a different order to that of the radio

set. Similarly, in the evolutionary process there is a material, mechanistic

aspect of matter which works according to mechanistic laws, like the radio set

itself, but there are also formative causes, the effect of which is to organise

matter. Each different kind of matter tunes in, as it were, to its own

particular field. As an organism starts to develop it begins to resonate to a

certain field, and the more the organism follows that particular path the more

it becomes habituted and goes on developing within that field to its final form.

Morphogenetic fields are thus seen to be an important component in the

explanation of the course of evolution.

 

In the evolutionary process there were at first elementary particles, then

simple atoms like hydrogen and helium, then the more complex atoms of the whole

range of chemical elements. The atoms of each element are structured by

mathematical laws, the exact number of protons and electrons structuring each

type of atom determining the properties of each particular element. When living

cells evolved, the chromosomes in each nucleus and the genes on them each have

their own particular structure. The universe thus formed can be seen to have

developed through two forces working together. On the one hand there is

energy/matter, which is unstructured, and on the other there is form, which is

the principle of structure in the universe. These two forces (p.23) work

together so that the organism is opening itself all the time to new form.

 

Of special interest here is the work of Ilya Prigogine, for which he won the

Nobel Prize in 1977. Prigogine, a Russian-born physical chemist, discovered that

within certain chemicals there are systems which he termed " dissipative

structures " . These maintain their order, and develop it further, by breaking

down other structures in the process. The entropy or disorder which results is

dissipated in the form of waste products. The self-organisation within these

chemical systems is so like that of living organisms that it has been suggested

that they may represent a link between non-living and living matter.

 

In a similar way, at the level of the cell there is continual interchange; the

cell is taking in matter/energy from the environment and giving out

matter/energy at the same time at the expense of increasing entropy, or

disorder. The cells of our bodies; and our bodies themselves, are being built up

in that way, day by day, hour by hour, in constant interchange with their

environment. This whole wave of energies is a dynamic process. Everything is in

a state of flux and change at every moment and two forces are at work. On the

one hand an organism tends to go out of itself, to open itself to other forms

around, and on the other hand it tends to organise itself, to centre on itself.

The actual forms that we know are the result of the balance between these two

tendencies. What frequently happens is that the tendency to go out of itself, to

transcend itself, increases and a disequilibrium takes place. If that

disequilibrium is allowed to go too far then the entity disintegrates. That can

happen at every level from chemical to living cell. On the other hand, the

self-organising power within the organism is always tending to reconstruct

itself, so that as the disequilibrium takes place and the organism starts to go

out of order it begins to reconstruct, and a new form comes into being and

(p.24) begins to tune in to a new morphogenetic field. It needs to be noted that

at present the theory of formative causation as put forward by Sheldrake is

still hypothetical; it has not so far been verified experimentally. Like Bohm in

physics when he is speaking of the implicate order, Sheldrake here does not

represent mainstream thinking in his field. Should experimental support be

forthcoming, however, Sheldrake's work would constitute a major breakthrough

beyond the mechanistic explanations of present-day neo-Darwinian molecular

biology, providing as it does a much more comprehensive understanding of the way

in which the process of evolution may be taking place.

 

We have, then, the new physics with its understanding of the physical world as a

field of energies, an intergrated whole, in which the whole is present in every

part; we have the theory of morphogenetic fields, within which organisms have

been built up continuously and are developing continually into new forms. The

principle of formative causation, within specific morphogenetic fields, applies

to everything in the cosmos from the organisation of the atom upwards, through

the molecule, the cell, the organ, the organism, the plant, the animal and the

human. With the advent of the human body that organising power within begins to

become conscious. A human being is a form of matter which has reached a very

high order of complexity and is so organised as to become conscious. The

breakthrough takes place when matter and form, which have been working together,

come into consciousness and we can become aware of ourselves as a material

organism with cells made up of matter from the first matter of the universe.

Each of us, in the cells of our body, are linked with the original matter of the

universe because the entire universe, and everything in it, is one integrated

whole. We are all linked with all the original cells which began to form on this

earth as it reached a state when life could emerge, about four billion years

ago. We all have (p.25) within ourselves the basic structure of the physical

universe and of life, but we also have this unique awakening into consciousness.

We can begin to control the matter of our bodies.

 

A great deal of what goes on in our bodies is unconscious; digestion, blood

circulation and so on obey the normal laws of biology, but we can also control

our bodies to a varying extent. We are discovering today how great that extent

can be. Control of the body by the mind can reach high levels. In yoga there are

cases where the yogi can completely control his breathing and even the beating

of his heart. So we are discovering to what extent the matter of the body can be

controlled by the mind. It is becoming clear also that within that material

universe there is a latent consciousness. Consciousness was potential from the

beginning and it emerges when the organism is sufficiently developed, as in a

human body. As consciousness emerges in us we become conscious of ourselves and

conscious of the universe around us. Mind is understood to have been present but

in a pre-conscious state, in lower levels of the organisation of matter, in

stones, metals, plants and animals. In human beings that mind which has been

working pre-consciously in the universe begins to emerge into consciousness.

 

These ideas of how form or field is structuring matter, as I have come to

understand it, have some similarity to the position of Teilhard de Chardin (The

Phenomenon of Man, 1959). The part of Teilhard's great theory which is

particularly relevant here concerns the operation of two forces which he calls

radial and tangential. The language used is of course metaphorical, but, if we

were to think of this visually, the idea would be that there is a centre out of

which the world moves. At every moment of time there is as it were a sphere, and

the particles on that sphere are governed by a tangential force which

corresponds to the forces about which physics speaks, the forces of gravity,

electromagnetism (p.26) and so on. These are the forces which organise and order

matter. Then, in Teilhard's understanding, there is also a radial force which

encourages the evolutionary movement outward to ever higher levels. At the

beginning of the evolutionary process the tangential force dominated, and that

is essentially a physical force which is unpredictable. It has no direction and

is totally randon in terms of the behaviour of the individual particles.

Further, it is dominated by the process of entropy [Wikipedia definition

appended] as the energy in the system becomes more and more uniformly

distributed. As matter gets organised into increasingly complex structure the

radial force begins to grow in intensity. So, as the universe continues to

evolve, the relative importance of the tangential force decreases while the

importance of the radial force increases. The radial force for Teilhard is

spirit and he speaks of it as Christ-consciousness. As the universe matures the

intensity of this radial force or Christ-consciousness increases exponentially,

being continuously contributed to and reinforced by all the centuries of

conscousness in the universe.

 

This is where we move again from physics and biology to psychology. Knowledge of

the human psyche has advanced immeasurably beyond Freud. The work of Jung opened

it up to much deeper dimensions but Ken Wilber has gone beyond the basic

structures as Freud and Jung understood them, linking these up with the highest

levels of human awareness. His principal books are The Spectrum of Consciousness

(1977), The Atman Project (1980) and Up from Eden (1980), and in these he gives

account of the gradual development of human psychology. This will be examined in

chapter two. Here it is sufficient to say that we discover that in us, at the

stage of development we are now reaching, the material universe is emerging into

consciousness. Our present consciousness is still very imperfect and our control

of matter by consciousness is rudimentary, to say the least, but we are (p.27)

beginning to discover that human consciousness can develop far beyond its

present level and that, for instance, the ways in which consciousness affects

matter are immeasurably more complex than we had previously imagined. This is

one of the points at which the link is made between Western understanding and

Eastern mysticism, for in the East this whole sphere of psychology has been

studied in immense depth for two thousand years at least. Mahayana Buddhism

particularly has reached an extraordinarily deep level with regard to the

understanding of psychological processes beyond the normal, in other words, of

transpersonal, transmental consciousness. Our mental consciousness, which is our

normal consciousness, is the level of consciousness emerging from the plant and

the animal states but now we are also able to go beyond mental consciousness and

experience the transpersonal, transmental or " supramental " consciousness, as Sri

Aurobindo called it. So now we begin to see that human evolution has come from

the matter of the universe through the plant and the animal levels to our

present state of being, and is emerging into a higher state of consciousness.

With that development we discover in ourselves the ground of the whole structure

of the universe and the whole scope of human consciousness. And that is

precisely what took place in India in the fifth century before Christ, when

there was a breakthrough beyond mental consciousness to the supramental with the

discovery of the Ultimate Reality sustaining the whole universe.

 

A New Vision of Reality (Western Science, Eastern Mysticism and Christian Faith)

Bede Griffiths

Templegate Publishers - Springfield, Illinois

ISBN 0-87243-180-0

Pgs. 9-27

 

 

1. Wikipedia Definition of " Entropy "

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy