The New Humanity - Part 2

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

We concluded Part 1 of " The New Humanity " with the following:

 

" Following creation came the drama of the Fall. (P.98) Ken Wilber and many

others today think of the Fall as an ascent rather than a descent, holding that

the original undifferentiated unity had to be fragmented, man had to become

conscious, and to develop and acquire a separate individuality. This point they

identify as the Fall, but that is certainly not the biblical vision and in my

view it is not the true vision. It is rather that in that original state, body,

soul and spirit were in harmony and as human beings developed consciousness,

they learned to distinguish themselves from other selves, from nature and from

God. As consciousness developed they became conscious of themselves as separate

from the body and separate from the mother. In that state they could open

themselves to the Spirit and allow the Spirit to guide them, but they could

equally separate themselves from the Spirit. They could fall away from the

Spirit and centre on themselves. This falling away from the Spirit into the ego,

the soul, the separated self, and thereby separating from God, is the essence of

original sin. That is told in Genesis in the story of the eating of the fruit of

the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The essence of it was disobedience.

The man did not listen to the Spirit. He did not follow the guidance of the

Spirit, and so he fell away from it into a separated self. Then the whole

tragedy of human existence takes place. Once you have fallen from the Spirit

into yourself, your separated self, you are divided. Humanity is now divided;

man and woman divided from nature, man and woman divided from one another, and

man and woman divided from God. Total disintegration takes place. That is the

Fall of man. It is a very gradual process, not clear at first but escalating in

its implications. The tragedy is that the more human faculties develop, the

greater the split becomes. It is a very little crack to begin with but as human

beings develop consciousness and all their powers, this capacity to separate

increases progressively. (P.99) Today we have probably reached the limit of this

disintegration with the present-day separation of persons from nature and from

God. But also, as this power to disintegrate develops and inner harmony is lost,

so the same power which causes one to separate can also enable one to unite.

Reason and intelligence can open one to the unity of the Spirit. Perhaps today

we are witnessing a new movement of the Spirit, a reintegration of humanity,

which is beginning to take place. It is significant that St. Paul contrasts the

'anthropos psuchikos', the soul-man, with the 'anthropos pneumatikos', the

spiritual man (1 Corinthians 2:14-15). This is the contrast between the man who

is centred on his soul, his ego, and the man who is centred on the Spirit.

(P.97-99)

 

Here now is Part 2.

 

Enjoy!

 

violet

 

 

 

The New Humanity - Part 2

 

The consequences of this inner fragmentation are truly appalling. Ken Wilber has

put it in an extremely interesting way in his book, The Atman Project, (1980),

where he says that the atman, the Spirit, is present to man from the beginning.

Atman is Sanskrit for Spirit. If human beings respond to the Spirit they grow

harmoniously; body and soul grow together in the harmony of the Spirit. But if

they separate from the Spirit they still have this goal of infinite

transcendence, for the spirit is infinite and eternal and beyond all. But now

fallen humanity has lost the vision of the Spirit beyond and everything focusses

on the self. The self becomes the centre and as such it becomes a substitute for

God. That is the great tragedy. As one's consciousness and sense of a separate

self develops, one loses the sense of a spiritual power beyond oneself.

Everything centres on the self and one becomes God for oneself. Every human

being wants to be God in this way. We all have in us the instinct for God, for

the Ultimate, but we have lost the sense of the Ultimate beyond. So in each

person there is repeated the fall into the separate self. The great tyrants of

history, Nero or Stalin or Hitler, are examples of man making himself God. This

goes all through human history. The more the powers develop, the more one's

consciousness and ego develop, the stronger becomes this Atman Project. (P.100)

Whether it is power or wealth or pleasure or success, what is happening is that

one is focussing on substitutes for God, creating a false ego substituted for

the true self. That is the tragedy of the Fall of man, which we all experience,

for it goes on all through human history. That is the situation of each one of

us.

 

The effect of the Fall according to the book of Genesis was that the man and the

woman were turned out of Eden and an angel with a flaming sword was placed there

to bar the way to the tree of life. (Genesis 3:24) What exactly does this loss

of Paradise mean? The book of Genesis simply speaks of the sufferings which will

ensue. " The earth will bring forth thorns and thistles " and the woman " shall

bring forth children with pain " . (Genesis 3:16,18) This shows that the man and

the woman would be in conflict with the world around them and with their own

bodily nature. But the division goes deeper than this. It marks a fundamental

split between nature and humanity and within humanity itself. The fall of

humanity is the fall from the unified state of being, when humanity was in

harmony with nature and with God, into the state of division and duality. It is

a fall from the unified or non-dualistic mind into the dualistic mind, that is,

into our present mode of consciousness. The human mind as we experience it

thinks always in terms of duality, of subject and object, of mind and matter, of

truth and error, and everything is perceived in terms of time and space. All our

science, philosophy and theology are products of this dualistic mind, and our

normal way of perceiving the universe around us is in terms of an inner and an

outer world. Yet there is always something in us which yearns for unity, which

is in search of the lost Paradise, and every religious system attempts to offer

a way to rediscover the lost unity, to return to Paradise.

 

But there is no simple way to return. An angel with a flaming sword stands in

the way. (P.101) There are forces in the unconscious which block the path. The

way forward lies only through suffering and death. This is shown in the story of

Noah. A flood comes to destroy the earth and everything in it and Noah and his

family alone survive. This signifies that this world is destined to pass away

with all humanity in its present state, but a new humanity is destined to be

formed. Noah and his sons Shem, Ham and Japheth, who represent all the nations

known to Israel at the time, are the representatives of this new humanity. It is

important to notice that it includes symbolically all the nations of the earth.

The vision of the new humanity at this stage is universal and God is represented

as making a covenant with the nations, that is, with the Gentiles, as Israel

came to understand them. As the biblical narrative proceeds, the new humanity is

seen to centre on the people of Israel, but always the " Gentiles " are seen to be

included in the promise made to Israel. Thus, as we have seen, when Abraham is

chosen to be the seed of this new humanity, the promise is made that his people

will be a blessing to all the earth.

 

From the time of Abraham the promises are seen to focus on Israel as the " people

of God " . The promises are renewed to Isaac and Jacob, to Moses and Joshua, to

David and Solomon. But then comes the great reversal. The kingdom of Israel is

divided, the people of northern Israel are taken captive by the Assyrians, and

Jerusalem is captured by the Babylonians and its people transported to Babylon.

But it is precisely at this point, when the fortunes of Israel are at their

lowest, that the prophets come to teach them to look forward to a higher

destiny. Jeremiah speaks of a " new covenant " , which God will make with his

people, when he will " write his law in their hearts " (Jeremiah 31:33). This is

the beginning of that passage to an interior religion which every religion has

to undergo if it is to survive, and which is so clearly the call of religion

today. (P.102) From reliance on external rites and doctrines religion has to

pass to the experience of God in the heart, and this movement of interiority has

to be constantly renewed. This comes out above all in the figure of the

" suffering servant " of Isaiah (Isaiah 52:13-53:12). Israel had experienced the

loss of everything that made up their religion, their king, their land, their

temple, but it was then that they awoke to the deepest realisation of God. The

concept of the suffering servant arose when they realised that God was in the

midst of their suffering and their death and not in their conquests and triumph.

It is through suffering and death that confidence in this world and in the

triumphs of the rational mind is broken and humanity learns to surrender to God,

to that transcendent Truth from which it has fallen. It was through its

humiliation that Israel learned to free itself from its pride and

self-sufficiency and to open itself to the other peoples of the world.

 

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

Christian Faith)

Bede Griffiths

Templegate Publishers - Springfield, Illinois

ISBN 0-87243-180-0

Pgs. 99-102