Transformation to unified humanity is not possible on the political plane alone, as was said long ago by Warren Wagar. It requires a new symbolic environment, new values, new rites and ceremonies, new interpretations of reality — in other words, a new religion. In this new religion, the value of universality must play a key part. Universality is an extension of our horizons beyond the narrow self and its needs and pleasures (an extension which all religions require), and also beyond family, tribe, and nation (which the great religions strive for, but have not achieved, being often actually divisive). Universality means an extension of consciousness, caring and sharing to all humanity, and indeed to all of God’s creation, even to the living planet Gaia herself.
The following paragraphs discuss some of the sources and ingredients of the new universal religion.
(1) The teachings of the existing Great Religions, which should by no means be discarded, but built upon and properly applied in a non-doctrinaire manner, in order to avoid the old divisiveness. Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, the American Native religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Sikhism, Jainism, Confucianism and others have achieved many great insights. Sometimes they are bound to a particular culture, but that would introduce all the more richness when we attempt a super-ecumenical synthesis. It is not clear if such a synthesis is possible in all respects, since some of the initial assumptions about the nature of God differ (e.g. monotheism and pantheism); but we might attempt to draw out the common elements. These certainly include the ethical teachings on the value of compassion and love; all religions teach the equivalent of the Golden Rule. The synthesis should not be a watered-down least common denominator, but a combination of basic insights, from which a new insight may emerge.
(2) There could arise new universal humanistic religions; in fact some have already arisen. The best example is the Baha’i Faith, with its insistence on continuing progressive revelation (Le. acceptance of the prophets of all the previous Great Religions, plus the addition of the latest, Baha’ullah), and its teaching that the content of this most recent revelation is precisely universalism. There is also Oomoto (whose other name and universal emphasis is Universal Love and Brotherhood), and World Goodwill (with its Great Invocation of Life, Light, and Love, and its commitment of members to be “worldservers”). These new religions have brought and are bringing into being a new universal vocabulary, though “brotherhood” must be expanded to include “sisterhood”. The Baha’i Faith, for example, proclaims that “the world is one country and humanity is its citizens”. However, there are still some doctrinaire and dogmatic aspects to some of these religions, too much emphasis on proselytizing which could lead to frictions, and features of esoteric doctrines in World Goodwill which may not be to everyone’s liking.
(3) It is clear that there must be consonance of religion with science. This is to be not just mutual grudging tolerance (each in its own realm without interference), not only “peaceful coexistence of different systems” living side by side, but an active gaining of religious insights from the findings of science, and a re-enchantment of science with a sense of the sacred. This means a veering away in science from dead mechanistic materialism, as theoretical physics has already done to a large extent; the overcoming of dualism of matter and mind (body and soul), and a firm footing for religious faith in at least provisionally confirmed ideas and concepts, not total reliance on second-hand revelation (e.g. accepting the revealed message from a book, without the possibility of a personal experience). As Thomas Berry said, we have a great new creation myth to tell, more wondrous than any we ever dared dream up before. (This scientific content of religion affects several succeeding points made here separately.)
(4) Panentheism: God in Nature and Nature in God (mutually), instead of transcendence of God over Nature as in Western monotheism. Perhaps “God” should be “Goddess” to emphasize intimacy and relationship rather than one-sided creation and dominance. This mutual relationship involves more than a vague infusion of God(dess) into Nature and vice versa; it is a definite mechanism, which I call “the ultimate wrap-around”: we, the products of Nature, create God who creates Nature and us. The ancient sacred symbol for this idea is the Uroborus, the snake swallowing its own tail. The modem expression of it is Hofstadter’s concept of “tangled hierarchies”, in which A is greater than B which is greater than C which is greater than A, in a cycle of intransitivity. One simple example of intransitivity is the child’s game “scissors cut paper, paper wraps stone, stone breaks scissors”. All this is possible because time is not a linear dimension and not really separate from space, which follows from the theory of relativity. Another image is the Moebius strip – a strip of paper given one twist and then glued together into a ring – which has only one surface and one circumference. Note the similarity of the Moebius strip to the symbol for Infinity (a figure 8 lying on its side). Infinity and eternity are not really indefinite extensions of numbers and time, but new entities of their own kind.
(5) The new view should comprise theories of emergence: the view that new qualities and new entities arise as more and more complex “wholes” form. wholes (or systems) being more than the sum of their parts. Thus a proton is more than the sum of 3 quarks, a hydrogen atom is more than a proton plus an electron, a water molecule is more than one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms (and on the macro scale, water is very different from a mixture of two colourless gases which may explode or bum), and (jumping ahead hugely) an organism is more than the sum of organs, tissues and cells, and a society (community) is more than the sum of individual persons or citizens.
Similarly, Roger Sperty postulates with some plausibility that the brain is more than the sum of neurons, glia. and neurotransmitters; and that consciousness is an emergent (i.e. new) quality of the brain, emerging from its super-complex relationships (networks), one of the emergent qualities also being ethical values, which can then exert “downward causation”.
The theory of emergence, first formulated by Henri Bergson as the “elan vital”, leads to several other ideas: (a) holism as opposed to reductionism; (b) panpsychism or radical vitalism; and (c) the primacy of relationships over materiality or substance. The latter two points are further discussed below.
(6) Panpsychism or radical vitalism postulates that everything is alive and conscious to some degree, even atoms and stones; but the degree of aliveness increases as we ascend the evolutionary scale; it gets brighter, just as wakefulness is brighter than sleep. Thus mind and matter always co-existed, primordially; neither is prior or superior to the other; neither are they separate “essences” (as Descartes’ dualism would have it) — they are two sides of the same coin, the inner and outer aspect, the subjective and the objective (how it sees itself and how others see it) – two sides of the underlying reality of all things. (See previous essay Both Sides Now, in Section VI.)
Another view is that there are really four entities: matter, energy, information, and meaning. (See the essay The Three Essences and subsequent ones in Sections II and IV.) Energy is the ability to move matter, information is the ability to move energy (or matter), and meaning makes of information a mental quality. Matter and energy are interconvertible, as Einstein showed; energy and information are also interconvertible, through the entropy-probability relationship, as Boltzmann showed. So the three can operate as a relay: even though information is extremely dilute energy, which is extremely dilute matter, yet information can move matter through the relay. But information in the form of “bits” or “yes or no” choices is only “mere” information. unless it also has meaning in the sense of being in the context of either trying to understand the present or the past or aiming at some purpose in the future, both of which presuppose the presence of a mind. Thus mind and matter can be seen to be related (perhaps interconvertible) through the relay.
(7) The forces of attraction (gravity, electromagnetic, weak and strong nuclear force) which pull together wholes can be equated to Love at higher levels of consciousness; thus Love becomes a primordial universal principle. It is as if even the elementary particles were trying to organize themselves into wholes or systems, but succeed only partially because of the countervailing influence tending toward disorder or increasing entropy. Slowly, over the ages, they succeed to form real systems in the form of complex living creatures, which then have ever higher consciousness, emergent new forms of mental functions, and thus greater capability to actualize Love at higher levels.
There is also the dark side, namely forces of repulsion (e.g. electromagnetic), which would be equated to Hate; this is also one of the “principalities and powers”, as the Devil used to be called. Yet attraction and repulsion are both needed to hold crystals and other structures together and give them coherence and beauty, just as figure and ground give coherence to a picture in a work of art.
(8) Relationships or connections become ever more important than material substances as we ascend the evolutionary scale from particles to atoms to molecules to macromolecules to cells to multicellular organisms. In an organism. the materials (atoms and molecules) are rapidly exchanged in metabolism; they are only passing through like water in a river or burning gases in a flame. It is the FORM that remains constant, is preserved as long as life persists; in fact it is the definition of life. The particular chemical processes and reactions and the structures of cells, tissues and organs guide the passage of matter through the system. under the overall direction of the genes, and the promoters and inhibitors that turn them on and off.
In Aristotle’s terms, the Formal Cause is more important than the Material Cause. It is also true that the Final Cause is more important than the Efficient Cause (or what we more narrowly call “the cause”) in living systems. That is, purpose (looking to the future) predominates over (narrowly defined) cause (pushing from behind); or, put still differently, free will appears as an emergent quality to outrank determinism. Biologists should, in my view, no longer shun teleological arguments; they are often obviously the simplest explanations, rather than long circumlocutions pushing the evolutionary-selection view; therefore they should be preferred as scientific explanations by the principle of parsimony, i.e. Occam’s Razor.
(9) Very important in the new religion should be the Gaia theory, the message that the Earth is alive. James Lovelock concluded this on the basis of analyzing components of the Earth’s atmosphere, when he was asked by NASA to devise a test that would show the presence or absence of life on Mars and the other solar planets. The atmospheres of all the planets except Earth are in chemical equilibrium, but in Earth’s atmosphere oxygen and methane coexist. Since they normally react quite quickly to give carbon dioxide and water, their presence together shows that they are being continually produced at least as fast as they are reacting together, and they can only be produced by life forms (oxygen by photosynthesis, methane by certain bacteria). The presence of these gases in the atmosphere is detected by infrared spectra, and Lovelock poetically declares that Planet Earth sings of life in an infrared melody to broadcast its message into space.
The Earth maintains these gases in steady state (not equilibrium) by homeostasis, which is a well-known mechanism in the metabolism of organisms, e.g. in keeping our temperature and our blood sugar level constant in spite of continuing flow of matter and energy in and out of the system. (Like a bathtub with both the tap on and the drain open.) And since the planet as a whole practices homeostasis, it is in some sense alive. Homeostasis also exists on Earth in other aspects: a steady temperature in spite of the solar energy output increasing over the geological ages, a constant salinity of the oceans in spite of the fact that the rivers keep washing in salt from the rocks, and other aspects.
Regarding the temperature regulation, Lovelock has devised a computer simulation which he calls “Daisy World”, in which white and black daisies change their relative abundances in order to stabilize the temperature. Sometimes when I wonder if Gaia will let humans survive in view of our destructiveness, I visualize myself plucking her Daisy petals while reciting “She loves me, She loves me not.”
The Gaia theory has obvious connections to ancient Mother Goddess religions. In fact, Native American tradition has a central belief in Mother Earth. I once heard a Native speaker remark, about the new belief in Gaia, that “people now accept it because a white man said it”. However, it is of some value to have the scientific basis for it.
The modem symbol of Gaia is, of course, the picture of Earth from space, a powerful symbol of the unity of life and ecological consciousness as well as world citizenship. It caught on immediately in popularity, showing that it corresponds to the emerging needs of humanity, to the spiritual soil in the collective unconscious from which our transformation must spring. If the NASA space program produced nothing more than that picture, it would have been worth it. Essentially we went into space just to get a look at ourselves. That picture is being distributed to every classroom (as far as possible) by the Planet Project of the World Federalists.
(10) Another part of the new religion is the great scheme of Teilhard de Chardin, the great prophet of the confluence of science and religion, the extender and generalizer of evolutionary concepts to the spiritual realm. From an enemy of dogmatic or fundamentalist religions, evolutionary thought becomes a great friend and interpreter of universalist religion. Teilhard postulates that life evolves from an Alpha Point (creation) to an ultimate Omega Point (union with God, or becoming like God). Gradually the evolving Earth is being covered, not only with a biosphere on top of the lithosphere and hydrosphere and in the atmosphere, but also with a noosphere (a word he coined), i.e. an envelope of increasing information with meaning, knowledge with wisdom.
Exponents of Teilhardism in our time are multiplying and becoming more eloquent: from Donald Keys (“Earth at Omega”) to Robert Muller (“New Genesis”) to Marilyn Ferguson (“The Aquarian Conspiracy”) to Mark Satin (“New Age Politics”) to Theodore Roszak (“From Person to Planet”). With the metaphor of humans as the Earth’s emerging nervous system (Teilhard’s noosphere), Teilhardism finds its culmination in Peter Russell’s book “The Awakening Earth”, and especially his powerfully beautiful video-tape “The Global Brain”. One of its points is the magic number 10 billion: 10 billion atoms make a cell, 10 billion nerve cells make a human brain, and 10 billion humans will form a unified human society. Already we are being linked by rapid communication technology, and the spiritual links are to follow shortly.
(11) Another important ingredient is the theory of self -organization in structures far removed from thermodynamic equilibrium, as explained in Erich Jantsch’s “Self-Organizing Universe”. The basis of this is lIya Prigogine’s concept of the “dissipative structure”, an open system far from equilibrium, which, surprisingly, can seemingly defy the second law of thermodynamics by evolving a highly organized (low-entropy) structure within itself. However, it does so only at the expense of increasing the entropy of the surroundings, so that the total entropy does increase (sometimes considerably) and the Second Law is not violated. Dissipative structures foreshadow living forms, but there are examples of simpler systems: e.g. the Belousov – Zhabotinsky reaction; a chemical “clock” system which periodically turns blue at regular time intervals only to fade out again; or the patterns that form if a liquid in a large shallow dish is heated from below.
Dissipative structures are closely related to the new theory of Chaos, a seeming disorder from which a new order can emerge. Simple examples are as common as turbulent flow of water in a mountain stream or waves breaking on an ocean beach; yet scientists until recently have not tried to explain such systems, because they are non-linear and therefore more difficult to solve. They could not even analyze the smoke rings coming from a pipe.
Recently, Stuart Kauffman and Per Bak have formulated the theory of “self-organized criticality” at the edge between order and chaos which supplements the Prigogine-Jantsch concept. (See essay Stuart Kauffman Models and How Things Come Together in Section XII.) They describe how life exists at the edge of chaos, i.e. near the phase transition from chaos to order. Life needs enough order for structure maintenance, but must also have enough flexibility for adaptation and responsiveness to change. It cannot be a rigid perfectly regular crystal or a totally disordered gas, but something in between – something that Goldilocks would say “is just right”. (See the essay The Goldilocks Effect in Section VIII.) There are conservative and radical elements in living structures; the genetic code conserves information (in copying and proof-reading, it makes only one error in a billion – the envy of every merely human proof-reader), but the immune system can react to a multiplicity of antigens. There are negative feedbacks which conserve (as in homeostasis) and positive feedbacks which accelerate at exponential rates (such as unbridled reproduction in the absence of predators).
Jantsch, following Prigogine, speaks of an accumulation of fluctuations in a dissipative structure, which destabilizes it. It can restabilize itself either by faIling back to a simpler structure (even to equilibrium which is death) or rising higher to an even more complex structure – breakdown or breakthrough. Fluctuations are due to positive feedbacks which run counter to the tendency to conserve, and so can be regarded as harmful; but they are also a necessary pre-condition for further evolution which after all is built up from mutations, those rare mistakes in copying the genetic code accurately. This brings us to the next point — consideration of the central importance in the new religion of the concept of Crisis.
(12) Crisis has to be seen as both danger and opportunity, as seen in the Chinese symbol for it containing the signs for both of these ingredients. Since humanity IS in a crisis, this fear-hope perception is profoundly meaningful to us. For example, Dorothy Baker has carried out a remarkable comparative study of the patterns of world civilizations converging to a decision point in our time, which she entitled “Catastrophe or Transformation”. Her study is based on the pattern of the Greek drama, with its phases of exposition, inciting action, progression, climax, and resolution, but the same pattern is present in Arnold Toynbee’s scheme of history, where he calls them genesis, challenge and response, rise or growth, zenith or apogee, breakdown and disintegration. “Resolution” of the dramatic or historic conflict does not have to mean “disintegration”, but so far that has been the pattern for all previous civilizations. Such a scheme of “cultural life-times” may be all right in Toynbee’s scheme, where there is always another civilization waiting in the wings to continue history, but if, as Baker claims, we now have an integrated “world civilization”, there would be nothing waiting in the wings.
Others have seen cycles of rise and fall in history, of course; among them Spengler (“Decline of the West”) and Pitirim Sorokin. The latter sees a succession of three phases: the ideational, idealistic, and sensate cultural styles; we live in a sensate (materialistic) age, but may be on the point of returning to an ideational stage, like the high Middle Ages in Europe, with an emphasis on the primacy of spiritual values. (The idealistic stage is intermediate, as in the Renaissance.)
The concept of crisis brings images of development in stages, like a staircase composed of a series of vertical rises and horizontal runs. (See the essay Rise and Run in Section X) The runs are plateaus of tranquility, integration, maturity, consolidation of previous gains; the rises are the crises, times of troubles and turmoil, chaos, an accumulation of fluctuations in Prigoginian structures. Instances are: (a) Toynbee’s image of the mountain climber (successive civilizations ascending to a ledge where they are arrested, and from which the next civilization resumes its ascent; or his alternative image of a wheel rolling along the road; any point on the rim ascends and descends, but the carriage moves forward. (b) Gesell’s or Erikson’s stages of child development, which show successions of growth spurts and plateaus of consolidation. (c) Piaget’s stages of cognitive development as stages of basic reorganization of intellectual functioning. (d) A similar scheme of moral development stages outlined by Kohlberg.
A crisis is understood as the time of reorganization, during which nothing is certain. (How well we recognize its signs in world politics today!) The original meaning of crisis was the turning point of an illness, in which the life of the patient hangs in the balance; by morning he/she will either recover or be dead. Patricia Close defines a political crisis as a time of maximum uncertainty, when perhaps dominance passes from one world power to another, as in George Modelski’s model of 100-year long cycles in recent history. It is a crisis when a caterpillar undergoes metamorphosis to a butterfly; during the great chrysalis of transition, the creature is neither caterpillar nor butterfly; its tissues and organs are in seeming confusion, as in embryonic development, but in both cases, new order emerges out of chaos. The creature is being “born again”, undergoing a “Second Genesis”, like our civilization in crisis.
In evolution, we mostly lack a fossil record of transitions between species, because the “missing links” go through their period of crisis/transformation too quickly in terms of geological time. The viability (fitness) of transitional forms must be rather low – a jump between two highly adapted plateaus. This is why Stephen Jay Gould (1980) speaks about “punctuated evolution”, the same staircase-like pattern that we have been describing.
Or think of “rites of passage”: from childhood to adulthood in a primitive initiation ceremony or modem confirmation or bar or bat mitzvah; from virginity to sexual activity; from fetus to newborn; even perhaps from the living to the dead – each passage is a crisis. What we think of as the end may be the beginning, like Phoenix rising from the ashes — another great symbol for our time. Each crisis is a “becoming”, each plateau is a “being” — the two modes of existence.
(13) The centre of gravity of our new ethical orientation must be reverence for life, the ethic of Jainism and Albert Schweitzer. This has been called “Polaris for the Spirit” (i.e. the guiding star for our navigation) by Carl Casebolt. The principle springs partly from scientific insight: all life on Earth is based on DNA rather than RNA (except for a few retro-viruses, like the HIV that causes AIDS), on proteins with “laevo” amino acids, on sugars with “dextro” orientation. These are all symmetry-breaking choices; it could have gone otherwise, and on some other planet perhaps did. This shows the unity or at least the “cousinhood” of all life forms, from bacteria at the base to the various pinnacles of the evolutionary tree, the flowering plants, the insects, the vertebrates. (I think that we should abandon the idea that humans are the only pinnacle – pride goes before a fall.)
We have an innate sense of kinship with mammals, though we do kill them for food and even (heaven help us) for sport; even though some of our theories arrogantly deny them souls. We see flowers as beautiful, symbols of peace and love, though we do pick them to decorate our tables and so destroy them; but we do not really regard flowers as fellow-beings. We see insects mainly (except for honeybees) as competitors or enemies, devouring our food supplies in “plagues of locusts” and the like, and we exterminate them mercilessly, though we seem sometimes to be losing the fight. Our understanding of the unity of life is dim and incomplete.
Ecological ethics is an actively evolving concern. Some of us have grown from a concern about “the environment” (a human-centred image of “us” being immersed in “it” and needing be kept neat for our own uses) to an ecological consciousness of being part of nature’s system of niches and cycles, something like the flow of Tao; to a spiritual union with the biosphere as Gaia’s body, the matrix (literally “the mother”) of our being. Betty Cole once said that we are passing through a gap between the intuitional view of kinship with nature that native people had and a still incomplete scientific evaluation of the same facts of unity. So the sources of respect for life are both scientific and spiritual. We know the kinship “from both sides now”, yet, because we are in that gap or pupa stage, we “really don’t know it at all”, as in the popular song about clouds.
(14) After all the science-based theorizing, we must return to the spiritual basis of all religion, in what Aldous Huxley has called “The Perennial Philosophy” (1946). Basically this is mysticism, a direct religious experience of God as the ground of all being, which has its place in all religions. This ineffable and inexpressible “peak experience” (Maslow) is achieved only with great spiritual effort by saints and those “pure in heart”. (The Medieval book “The Cloud of Unknowing” describes the effort and the struggle to reach this stage.) But a lesser degree of this different kind of knowledge is achievable by all with only a little reflection and concentration; I call it “the sense of the Sacred” which can be felt in nature and all things beautiful, and which lifts one’s spirit above the level of the mere humdrum secular humanism which some would tell us is sufficient. Sure, a moral life is totally possible at that level; but it leaves one’s spirit unsatisfied in its yeaming for spiritual sustenance on which to thrive.
Various concepts are related to the mystical experience: Carl Jung’s “individuation” (which he sees as the inclusion of certain unconscious contents into the narrow Ego, thus creating the wider Self), Buddha’s “Enlightenment”, in which the meaning of everything becomes totally and immediately clear (does not require intellectual explanation), “self-transcendence”. The path to this higher consciousness is meditation, now recognized, even by physiological measurements of heart-beat, breathing rate, metabolic rate etc. to produce a distinct state of consciousness different from both wakefulness and sleep. Other “psycho-technologies” (Marilyn Ferguson) can be used, and the paths through knowledge (Jnana Yoga), loving worship (Bakhti Yoga), and good works (Karma Yoga) are well recognized in Hinduism, besides the path through meditation (Raja Yoga).
Mysticism has been a part of all the great religions, though sometimes an unrecognized, unofficial, even a subversive or heretical part; since, as a highly individual practice, it undermines the authority of priest and church, and eliminates the role of all intermediaries and intercessors between the human soul and God. G.B. Shaw in “Saint Joan” thought that Jeanne d’Arc was burned at the stake mainly because she heard and followed direct voices rather than being an obedient child of Mother Church.
Mysticism means direct, radical empiricism, though different in quality from scientific empiricism. We might note here E.F. Schumacher’s reference to four kinds of knowledge, especially his distinction between knowledge of external physical reality through reason and knowledge of internal psychic reality through love. Such radical individual empiricism is opposed both to abstract dry theological doctrines supported by church authority and ritual, and to super-conservative fundamentalism based on the Word as revealed to others. Although Ultimate Reality (“The Ground of All Being”) is profoundly eternal and unchanging because it is outside time, its direct experience by humans may take varied forms; compare e.g. William James’ case studies in “Varieties of Religious Eperience”.
(15) Related to mysticism is the realm of the archetypes in the collective unconscious, as postulated by C. Jung. The collective unconscious is the ancient (perhaps timeless) gathering place of human and pre-human cultures and archetypes. The latter are seen as the deep expressions of the basic schemata within which human mental and spiritual experience is framed. Archetypes are vehicles of cultural and spiritual heredity, just as genes and chromosome are vehicles of physical and biological heredity.
We might picture consciousness like a spotlight in the middle of a darkened room, with doors leading to other rooms in the unconscious (personal and collective) and the superconscious. The archetypes of the collective unconscious inhabit one of the rooms, and are accessible to us in dreams and legends. (See the essay Realm of the Mind in Section VI.)
(16) Then there is the tension between existential responsibility and Buddhist-type non-attachment. There is this dizzying realization that it is we, as free individuals, who make decisions at the crossroads between catastrophe and transformation, without necessarily always knowing the consequences of our actions, because these consequences may be counter-intuitive. The full realization of this responsibility is so awesome that it cannot be endured undiluted. It must be tempered with nonattachment, in which we do not fervently hang on to the object of our desires, no matter how noble and altruistic. We finally say “let it be” or “Thy will be done”, even about human survival.
In this tension between responsibility and non-attachment we teeter on the knife-edge between being “destroyers of worlds” (as Oppenheimer quoted the Rig Veda after the first atomic bomb test at Alamogordo) and being “children of the Universe who have a right to be here”, feeling that “the Universe unfolds as it should”, flowing with the rhythms of the Eternal Tao. Non-attachment, yet commitment; surrender to the Everlasting Arms, yet remembering that “God has no hands but yours to do His work on this Earth, no eyes but yours, no feet but yours” (as St. Theresa said). The tension is brought out in many other images: the Church Militant and the Church Triumphant, the Yogi and the Commissar (Arthur Koestler), Mystics and Militants (Adam Curle).
(17) A somewhat unlikely, but nevertheless vital, ingredient in the new religion is humility, traditionally a great Christian virtue (pride being the most deadly of the deadly sins). The catatonic children of the story “Childhood’s End”, who deflected the Sun, the Moon and the planets from their courses, are not the Son of Man or Daughter of Woman, not the spiritual evolutionary successors of humans, because they lack the main attribute of God, which is Love, not Power; the power of love, not the love of power. The gentle and humble Francis of Assisi is more along the true upward path toward the Omega convergence.
Some recent advances in game theory help to tell us why. In Robert Axelrod’s computer tournament of Prisoner’s Dilemma games, Rapoport’s short and simple “tit-for-tat” program won – not because it could defeat any other program (in fact it could not), but because the more sophisticated programs killed off each other. Similarly in a truel (a three-cornered duel), the two best marksmen tend to kill each other, leaving the worst one as the winner (or, better, the survivor). “The meek shall inherit the Earth.” Humility may be closer to the meaning of evolutionary fitness than strength. One thinks of the children’s story of the ten billion cats, who fought about which is the most beautiful, until all were dead except the one who knew she was not beautiful and so stayed away from the fight; she was then recognized as the most beautiful cat after all.
In spite of Nietzsche’s attempt to revaluate the values and his apotheosis of Superman, the old Christian and Buddhist ideal of humility stands scientifically vindicated, as we now understand the mechanism.
(18) Synchronicity is illustrated by the “hundredth monkey” phenomenon. The basic myth (a true story) is that one monkey, and then another, learned to wash her sweet potato before eating it, as observed on the Japanese island of Koshima in 1952-58. The practice spread slowly, in linear fashion, until the hundredth monkey was reached. This exceeded some threshold of criticality, and the practice then spread exponentially, like wildfire, even jumping from island to island where monkeys could not even observe each other. It is this last point, learning without direct contact, as if frequent enough performance of the act had smoothed the way somehow for its own repetition, which constitutes synchronicity.
The mechanism is thought to consist of “morphogenetic fields” (Aristotle’s “formal cause”) fields which orient growing tissues in embryos and emerging behaviour in monkeys along predermined lines of force, like iron filings around a magnet. The field is formed by the first few tissue cells, or by the first 100 monkeys (the pioneers, like the leader stroke before the main stroke of a lightning flash which pre-ionizes the path), and then influences the successive units directly but invisibly, not by imitation.
This explains such puzzling phenomena as (a) the ease of crystallizing certain new chemical compounds with increasing rapidity after previous successes in crystallizing them, even in widely dispersed laboratories, although crystallization is extremely difficult to induce the first time around; (b) the frequent occurrence of new inventions or discoveries simultaneously in several places by different researchers, as if somehow “the time is ripe”; (c) the observation that we sometimes encounter a new word, sight, sound, or smell, if we have experienced it once, in quick temporal succession, again and again.
Above all, the phenomenon gives us hope that transformation to a peaceful, just and sustainable world order could occur much more rapidly than the linear extrapolation of the present slow rate would suggest. We are still pushing the rock uphill like Sisyphus – but unlike Sisyphus, we may find the top of the hill and then the rock will roll down the other slope without further effort. This hopeful implication makes this a valuable component of the new religion, especially since the aspects of the Crisis model are so awesome.
And so we have it, the 18 ingredients of a new religion for our age: 1. Megasynthesis of the Great Religions. 2. New universal humanistic religions. 3. Consonance of religion with science. 4. Panentheism. 5. Emergence (holism). 6. Panpsychism. 7. Love as a primordial principle. 8. Relationism. 9. The Gaia theory. 10. Teachings of Teilhard de Chardin. 11. Self-organizing structures. 12. Crisis transitions. 13. Reverence for life. 14. Mysticism, the Perennial Philosophy. 15. Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious. 16. Existential responsibility in tension with non-attachment. 17. Humility. 18. Synchronicity.
We have the 18 ingredients, but not yet an over-arching founding myth or unifying concept or charismatic leader. “Charisma” means “grace”, and grace is a free gift of God. In the extreme of our crisis, may it come to us soon.