Cosmology and Mystery for a 21st Century UU Theology
Cosmology and Mystery for a 21st Century UU Theology
Rev. Dr. Matthew Johnson
January 2020
When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
Walt Whitman, 1865
When Whitman wrote these words, at the end of the Civil War, the lecturer in the lecture hall would have described the motion of the planets around the sun, the distance between those planets, and the mass of these heavenly objects. Using Newtonian physics and Cartesian dualism, he described a galaxy of objects, operating in line with simple rules of motion. Whitman, the great transcendentalist and American poet and mystic, wandered, instead, into the mystical moist night-air, searching for life and wonder. He felt, as did Emerson, Fuller, and their contemporaries, that there was more to life, nature, and existence than the reductionist materialism of the Enlightenment; yet they did not wish to surrender commitments to freedom, reason, and progress embedded in that Enlightenment.
During my sabbatical this fall, I’ve been exploring mystic practices like Tarot, the Enneagram, and the archetypal psychology of Carl Jung and James Hillman. These interwoven conversations have led me back to my long interest in physics, cosmology, and ontology. (It was Hawking’s A Brief History of Time that helped lead me into ministry, with its closing invitation to consider the theological implications of discovery.) For my own purposes, and for those who are curious, this treatise sketches a neuro-cosmology for our tradition — a scientific grounding for mystical and mysterious living.
When Whitman’s astronomer lectured, here are some things he did not know: that the Milky Way was only one of at least 200 Billion galaxies; that matter, at high enough speed, was equivalent to energy; that light was both a particle and a wave at the same time; that particles exist in multiple spaces at once, and are not fixed until measured; that measuring one particle can change the character of another particle, miles away, because they are “entangled”; that most of the universe’s mass is undetectable by our instruments, but clearly present; that the universe is expanding from a beginning event some 15 billion years ago; and so on.
Likewise, if Whitman went to a lecture on the mind, back in 1865, he might have heard a similar presentation. A dualism between mind and body would have been asserted, and the realm of spirit separated from the realm of the body. While a few would have embraced the strict materialism that denied the existence of mind or spirit at all, most would have held to Descartes’ dualistic view — which, let’s be clear, was also a colonialist, racist, and sexist view. It implied in theory, and was used in practice, to deny the full spiritual and cognitive equality of everyone who wasn’t wealthy, European, and male. Though phrenology had fallen out of favor by 1840, the underlying idea that some brains were purer and stronger was well-ensconced. The mind would have been characterized as one type of thing, and the material world as another altogether.
But everything this hypothetical lecturer would have said about the mind was wrong. Though the brain, an organ of the body, is in our head, our “mind” is a process, not a place — an interaction between our brain, our nerves, and outside stimuli. We know now that our thoughts and our bodies are deeply interwoven — indeed, they cannot be separated. Meditation affects the heart rate, and our diet changes our dreams. It is not our brain that thinks, but our whole body alongside the world we live in that thinks, feels, and connects. The whole neurological world has changed in the last 20 years, and we have a much more interconnected understanding of how cognition works than we used to.
And yet, just as many American students learn a set of fictions about American history — simplified narratives that gloss over the uncomfortable parts — we still learn an Enlightenment science that emphasizes independence, materialism, and denies the mysterious and complicated. The more “complicated” truths of relativity, quantum physics, and neurological interdependency are “postponed” for later study — which, for most, never comes.
As a Unitarian Universalist born into this faith in the Pacific Northwest in 1977, I absorbed this materialism both in school and in church, even though our transcendentalist forebearers knew, more than 100 years prior, that this cold universe was somehow wrong and that the insights of physics indicated that the poets, not the lecturers, had it closer to the truth. I hungered for mythical, mystic, and spiritual language to describe the feeling of interconnectivity — which physics affirms but the common teaching denied. The metaphor most “at hand” for me was not from church, but one created by George Lucas in conversation with Joseph Campbell, and borrowing from the ontology of Taoism. As Obi-Wan Kenobi explains to Luke in the first Star Wars film, “an energy field created by all living things [which] surrounds us and penetrates us” felt cosmologically correct. When I read the Tao Te Ching for myself, years later, the pieces started falling together. Quantum mechanics, dark matter, and relativity indicate that Lucas’ mythic, borrowed ontology, though fictionalized, is still probably closer to the truth of how the universe works than the Newtonian mechanical model of the learn’d astronomer.
All this background is preliminary.
Let me briefly invoke some of the intellectual predecessors of this sketch. Begin with the Upanishads, and (later) the Vedanta school of Hinduism, which asserts that Brahman is Atman — and Atman is Brahman. This is to say that the universal spirit, Brahman, is in Atman, our individual spirit, and that our individual spirit is part and parcel of the universal spirit. Emerson, reading a poor translation, named this the Soul and the Over-Soul. The infused and diffuse incarnationalism of the sub-Continent is reflected in the ontology and the many Gods of each place, person, and spirit (the Axis Mundi’s are infinite), and in the neuroscience of Buddhism which asserts (correctly, the neuroscientists now tell us!) that individual separate consciousness is an illusion. Draw a wavy line to Thales, the ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher who understood that everything in the world had soul or mind: psyche. See that Leibniz and Spinoza were not philosophical disasters, solved by Immanuel Kant’s assertion that time and space were the a priori realities in which we existed, but that they were reaching for a truth physics hadn’t arrived at yet, and they didn’t quite have the language for: that we do not exist in space and time but that our very being is part of the web of spacetime. Include both Whitehead and Hartshorne, who advanced pan-psychism as a solution to the dualism/materialism dead-end. Their ideas were ignored for a few generations, until science caught up. Include, but make less colonial, archetypical psychology and the notion that each person has an “acorn” waiting to become; that our dreams, our visions, and our impressions speak from an interconnected depth dimension — from the collective unconscious mind. Connect, as adrianne marie brown does, the insights of naturalism and organizing to name the power of organic emergence to shift consciousness and reality with love. Include the insights of relativity and quantum mechanics, including quantum entanglement, indeterminacy, anti-matter and dark matter, and so forth. Include the insights of deep ecology and systems thinking. And refer to Richard Grigg’s beautiful little book, and his charge to Unitarian Universalism to “re-enchant the world.”
What comes of all this?
15 Billion Years ago, a great deal of energy flowed outward from a central point. Like a milkweed seedpod releasing pollen, or a multi-directional speaker blasting out a good beat, waves of energy spread out, at enormous speeds. As that field of energy slowed, it became matter. Let us not forget, however, that at the subatomic level, all that is is still energy: vibrating, uncertain, and connected to the rest of the energy by means we can observe but not yet understand. Clusters of matter attracted other matter, and the energy began to organize. All the particle/wave energy of the universe is intelligent — responding to stimuli, replicating, processing, creating. Which is to say, all this energy/matter is conscious. This consciousness, which communicates with itself through fields of energy [including light (wave/particle), sound and sonar (waves), scent and taste and touch (particles), electro-magnetism (fields), quantum entanglement (through yet unknown ways), gravity (fields), and other means] is created by all things, sustains itself, and connects itself.
This consciousness, which some Hindus call Brahman, the Taoists call Tao, we might call, with the ancient Greeks, “Psyche Kosmos.” the Cosmic Mind — or, in Latin, “Anima Mundi”, the Soul of the World. Using the Ancient languages indicates the wisdom the ancients had, some in the West forgot, and new science is recovering.
Of course, not only did the Taoists and Hindus have a metaphor for this cosmology, but so do Indigenous People around the globe. Conscious of the danger of appropriating or flattening these cosmologies, I have been nonetheless persuaded that they, too, should be invoked here. Indigenous people around the globe have sets of myths, rituals, and understandings that indicate the way in which the people, other life, the earth, the spirit, and the whole of the cosmos are interconnected. Carol Lee Sanchez, for example, notes how “Native Americans believe themselves to be an integral part of the natural world,” not separate or higher from it. This core conviction shows up in myth, ritual, and daily and ecological practice. She calls this “Principle of Relatedness” (as noted in the Lakota phrase Mitakuye Oyas’in, “all my relations”). Sanchez argues that adopting something like this view — that the Great Mystery includes all thought and matter, and so everything is sacred and worthy — would promote sustainability and community. Not only do I concur, but I note that one can draw this cosmological conclusion, and the attendant ethical wisdom, from a whole variety of religious, scientific, poetic, and cultural traditions. It is the whisper, the shout, the song which has sounded “through the ages.”
In the Christian Tradition, the poets, the mystics, the radical feminists, and the process theologians have a description of divinity that corresponds to this Psyche Kosmos. They have understood the truth and named it. God is a verb, not an object. Not the mover, but the motion. We can turn to William Blake, whose poetic understanding of the spiritual life as the life aware of, and responsive to, the interconnections between all life, prefigured both the transcendentalists and modern physics:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour . . .
Even scientists who try to describe this work resort to metaphors and mythic language, such as “spooky action at a distance,” “dark matter,” and even “The Big Bang.” The poets, mystics, and storytellers are signaling and signifying a depth dimension, a truth that is felt but can be quickly fossilized in creedal or orthodox language. We must leave the lecture room for the night air.
Analogies can help. Charles Hartshorne, the philosopher, naturalist, and lay Unitarian, drew an analogy between cells in the body, and “creatures” in God, arguing that “as each of us is the super-cellular individual of the cellular society called a human body, so God is the super-creaturely individual of the inclusive creaturely society.” (Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes, 59). But it is not just creatures. He writes:
One more step. Even supposed that cells feel, we have the molecules, atom, and still simpler constituents of nature to consider. Either the explanation in terms of sympathy, feeling of feeling, the root idea of love, goes to the body of things or it does not. If it does, then we have a coherent system . . . Otherwise we have a dualism of two ultimately different ways in which mind is related to what it experiences or knows, or in which individuals are held together to constitute a universe. . . . More and more, physicists dare to say that all nature is in some sense life-life, that there is no absolutely new principle of life that comes in at some point in cosmic evolution . . . Mind in a most generalized sense will be accepted as [the universal principle of reality]. . . . Then love will relate God not only to human beings but to all creatures . . . (ibid., 62–63).
The science that Hartshorne referred to as “more and more” in 1984 is now a consensus. Consciousness, though still something of a mystery, is widely considered to be inherent in all energy (which is all matter), and “emerges” as the energy grows in complexity and interconnection. And since all energy is connected (quantum entanglement, fields of gravity, electromagnetism, etc), then a Psyche Kosmos — an impersonal but real ongoing process of integration and connection — would be both scientifically plausible and theologically appropriate.
It is also — and this is important — ethical. I believe, contrary to some, that the ethical consequences of our ontological suppositions should weigh on us and help us decide if our picture of the world is worth adopting. And the pan-psychic view is more ethical. Pan-psychism is anti-colonial. Pan-psychism denies a dualism between “mind” and “body”, it denies that some minds are more worthy than others, and it counters the individualism and “property rights” idolatry that undergirds genocide, slavery, colonization, rape culture, and is, in this pandemic, leading to even more death as I write.
Blake’s poem[1] comes to the same conclusion. When you see infinity in a grain of sand, then the ethical consequences of cruelty to animals and the poor, and to children, are cosmological. When you hold the “child’s faith” in interconnection, and respond to doubt with “riddles” (Zen koans?), then you can come to see that divisions between those born to delight and those born to misery is a great lie, and that when we see “through” our vision, instead of with it, we grasp the eternal truth of our interconnectedness and interdependency.
Infinity in the palm of our hand, indeed.
This picture of the Anima Mundi, the Psyche Kosmos, permits one, by faith, to go further and hold to a vision of a Soul which is more personal than I’m suggesting here. One can add to this vision with a theistic personality; or one can stop where I am usually but not always comfortable stopping: with a Taoist Way, which flows through all things but does not command, or with the “lure” of process theology, issuing a holy song which invites us to life, wonder, and love. It is the Psyche Kosmos which is ever-present, and to which we are particularly attuned when we engage in spiritual practice, are caught-off-guard with that feeling of “absolute dependence” (Schleiermacher, of course).
To be in touch with this energy field is to feel a sense of both “participation” and “transcendence.” These two feelings are the purpose of religion, argues Richard Grigg, lay Unitarian Universalist and professional theologian, in his book “To Re-Enchant the World.” Through pathways like direct experience of the creative source/abyss, arts, nature, community, and justice-making we cultivate this feeling of being part of something, and simultaneously connecting to something larger than ourselves. When we feel part of this whole, the world is re-enchanted with mystery, wonder, awe — and purpose. The Psyche Kosmos is something we are part of, and yet it is much larger than us — it is everything!
But we are part of it. And given the realities of quantum entanglement, energy fields, and universal mind — which we approach most clearly, perhaps, in the depth dimension of our subconscious and dream-life — we can suggest that yes, in fact, our thoughts, actions, and stance towards life, other people, and mystery is partially constitutive of the whole. Bishop Berkley goes too far to suggest that the universe is only in our minds, but it is not too far at all to say that our mind helps shape the universe. Atman is Brahman. Or, as Octavia Butler puts it:
God is Change
And hidden within Change
Is surprise, delight,
Confusion, pain,
Discovery, loss,
Opportunity, and growth.
As always,
God exists
To shape
And to be shaped.
Shape and be shaped.
I hope I have made clear here that nothing in this vision is new. The ancients in Greece and India expressed it, poets have named it, and scientists have bumped up against it. It is a version of process theology.
It is similar to the universalist version of the Perennial Philosophy, which dates back into antiquity but was made popular by Aldous Huxley, and is, in various ways, embraced by Huston Smith, Joseph Campbell, and many Unitarian Universalists. Some of these proponents claim that all the world’s religions share a common source, and thus are fundamentally “the same” — or, in a supersessionist or colonialist way, that some are “higher expressions” of the same single idea. I do not think this correct. Instead, I am claiming that some elements in many of the world’s religions and philosophies point to a similar cluster of notions. Using different metaphors, myths, languages, and rituals, these traditions indicate in a general sense some analogous understandings. These understandings include that the Universe is (or has) a Soul or Mind, of which each particle and wave is part. We are part of that wholeness, and both shaper and shaped by it. Moreover, these understandings also take from this ontological claim the ethical one: that we owe a duty of reverence, care, and justice to the world we are part of, and that is part of us.
If this vision is correct, then it ought to inform our religious, spiritual, social, and personal lives. The common elocution of divinity for Unitarian Universalists, “Spirit of Life,” is a reasonable analogy to Psyche Kosmos.
Blow in the wind, rise in the sea;
move in the hand, giving life the shape of justice.
In this prayer, and ones like it, the petitioner seeks to “shape and be shaped by” the unconscious unity of existence. These prayers, and similar spiritual practices, bring us into greater awareness of this spirit of the cosmos. By being in greater awareness, we may more faithfully discern the depth dimension of our lives and the movement of the spirit. We may feel more deeply both transcendence and participation, and thus be more courageous, wiser, and more compassionate. We also seek to shape the Psyche Kosmos with our practices — and we can. We are part of the cosmic mind and are a participant in it. This is not to endorse the “manifestation” theory of the health and wealth gospel, or the ideas of “The Secret,” which are riven with theodicy problems of the highest order. Though our practices matter, they are not determinative. Our healing, success, or victory isn’t only a function of how well we pray or envision our lives. Yet, intention, heart, and willingness do matter for our own lives and the lives of others.
The three spiritual dimensions I’ve been exploring during this sabbatical can be used to illustrate how this might work. One could select other practices — labyrinths, centering meditation, yoga, lectio divina, nature walks, journaling, and so forth. In a 2012 paper for the Malibu Study Group, Arvid Straube explores the spiritual practices and related cosmology of Unitarians such as William Ellery Channing and Henry Nelson Wieman in a very similar vein to what I’m doing here. They, likewise, understood spiritual practices as ways to “discern [your] purpose and cultivate one’s powers in service to God and creation” (Straube quoting Hardies). Wieman’s process theology saw human lives as part of the process of Creative Interchange; coming into awareness of our participation was how we learned and practiced lives of meaning.
Like I wrote above, this isn’t new work. Not within our tradition or outside of it.
But let me take these three practices I’ve been playing with: the Tarot, the Enneagram, and Archetypal Psychology. (I will note that I have heard from many colleagues that these practices, particularly the Tarot and Enneagram, are increasingly popular among us. We are using them between ourselves, in our professional discernment, and in chaplaincy work. But we’ve been cautious about sharing them with our congregations — and I think it is time to “break the seal” and share this growing passion with more of the people we serve.)
The Tarot cards, part of the Western Esoteric Tradition, use archetypes, images, and associations to provoke exploration of the depth dimension. Tarot cards don’t “tell the future.” But when the cards are shuffled, cut, dealt, and read with spiritual intention, who is to say that the Psyche Kosmos is not participating with us in selecting and understanding the cards? When we bring ourselves into awareness of the flowing spirit, our reading of the cards can be surprisingly insightful. When we do it a perfunctory way, we might miss these deeper dimensions. It is helpful to see them as an invitation to become aware of the movement of the Psyche Kosmos in our lives, and the place of our lives in that Psyche Kosmos. This is a very Unitarian Universalist interpretation: an invitation, not an answer. Anything that focuses our attention on the depth of our lives gives us an opportunity to connect with the Psyche Kosmos.
The Enneagram, also considered part of the Western Esoteric Tradition, has mysterious roots. An Armenian mystic, G.I. Gurdjieff, taught it to students beginning about 1916 (near the same time that Relativity, early discoveries in Quantum Physics, and the Archetype work of C.J. Jung were happening). He indicated it was ancient, and perhaps tied back to the Hermetic philosophy of the ancient world. It was spread quietly to small groups until the 1970’s when it came into more public view. Now, you can find dozens of books, podcasts, and thousands of articles about it. I won’t reprise the whole system here, but only to indicate a few key points. (1) The Enneagram can be understood as a personality tool (you locate your type, and discover what it says about yourself), but also as a process tool — a journey from one position to the next around the circle. In this way it mirrors the actual and potential poles of divinity under process theology. (2) The circle represents the whole, and each of the nine types make up part of the whole. It is thus an invitation to pluralism. As a social 8w9, my journey to wholeness, maturity, and meaning is different than a person who has a different type. We are not all the same. But my journey is not uncharted — I can learn from other social 8w9’s about what they have learned on their journey. It is similar to and reinforces the basic concept of Church and Buehrens’ “Cathedral of the World” metaphor. (3) The Enneagram invites you to consider your deeper motivation, grounded in your longing to connect with the world. It posits that the childhood faith of innocence and full connection, as named by Blake’s Auguries of Innocence, for example, is our natural state. We develop our type as a way to deal with how that innocence was distorted. It offers a pathway to transcend or transform your fears and reconnect with that innocence through wholeness and spiritual growth — a kind of second naiveté, to borrow a term from biblical hermeneutics.
Likewise, Archetypal Psychology offers a pluralistic, image, and story-based approach to understanding oneself, and one’s place in a larger universe, at a depth dimension. While Freud identified the power of the subconscious, Jung argued that Freud placed too much emphasis on sex and parental influence. Jung argued, in contrast, that we have multiple motivations and myths. Jung’s own approach (like Freud’s) was hopelessly European and male. James Hillman, the key figure in post-Jungian Archetypical Psychology, and others took the insight to a more universal perspective, identifying that each person has an “acorn” — an inner purpose longing to become an oak tree — which we might feel, cultivate, and follow when we got connected to stories, myths, images, dreams, and the longing of our hearts. Hillman denied what he called “the parental fallacy” and said that our purpose came from something deeper than our environment or our genetics — a third thing — a soul. Truthfully, this whole discipline needs to do much more work to be anti-colonial and anti-racist. There is an overreliance on Greek and European myths, and the rich subconscious experiences of non-westerners needs to be explored — by folks in those traditions, not “cultural tourists.”[2] Yet, Archetypal Psychology invites us to consider the importance of what is below the surface. Our myths, our dreams, our stories shape our consciousness, our identity, our faith, and language, and our lives. Coming into a deeper understanding of these archetypes and attending to the depth dimension through spiritual practices such as prayer, meditation, journaling, and spiritual direction helps us to discover our inner unique purpose and to be a fuller participant in the transcendent reality.
That is what unites these three practices, and all of the spiritual practices that a person might do. They are paths to “grow down” (Hillman). Doing the practice invites us to come into awareness and attunement with the Psyche Kosmos. The Tao is behind all things, “something always sings”, God is always with us, we are stardust: however you phrase it, the holy is consistently present. This neuro-cosmology means that it is NOT a question of whether or not the holy is with us, but a question of how well attuned we are to the whole of which we are a part. When we flow with, vibrate with, channel, and embody the Psyche Kosmos, then all kinds of things happen, including:
· We feel the sense of ultimate dependence, awe, and wonder that leads to deeper vision, gratefulness, and truth-seeking.
· We are more aware of our inner purpose (our acorn), our calling, and what we should do with our lives and our days.
· We become more conscious of finitude and interdependence, which makes us more humble and more empathic. Humility and empathy are fruits of imagination. We see how other souls are part of the same whole as we are, shedding our illusions of material independence.
Gratitude, compassion, purpose, and meaning are pretty good things. One can argue, and I think we should, that these things are life’s purpose. Inviting ourselves and others into this life should be, thus, what our ministry and communities are for.
It is important to note, however, that each person’s meaning and purpose will take on a different character. The search for meaning and purpose, and understanding yourself as part of the Psyche Kosmos, is universal. But the meaning of your particular life is yours alone. Community can help you discover that meaning, cultivate it, achieve it, and reflect on it.
Tools like the Enneagram can help us discover what that purpose is. Without getting here in the weeds of the system, it turns out that with “wings” and “subtypes” there are 54 types. Each of these 54 pathways has its own core needs, core longings, and ways of being in the world.[3] As spiritual guides, we can help others discover their unique pathway — by using this tool, or many others. The main thing is to invite people to go deeper into resonance with the Psyche Kosmos, for it is there that their mission will become clear.
As an Enneagram 8, I am particularly attentive to the question of power. But I think this neuro-cosmology raises questions of power for everyone. Pan-psychism under process theology manages a balance between freedom and dependence — we can channel our soul power to affect our own actions, the actions of others, and our environment — but we are also affected by the actions of others, and by the wider unconsciousness. We shape and are shaped, just like God, as Butler wrote. Paradoxically, as the Taoists and mystics have long argued, as we align ourselves with the Psyche Kosmos, we exert less “will” but have more “agency.” Being in touch with our purpose and inner mission gives us a sense of power — and holding fast to interdependence can promote ethical use of that power. As King argued, we need both love and power to build justice — and we also need love and power to find and actualize our purpose. This is a virtuous circle, because it is precisely love and power (participation and transcendence) that we experience when we are in touch with the vibrations of the Psyche Kosmos, and when we are well attuned, we can bring that love and power into our lives and into the world.
I have suggested in this treatise some of the implications for the religious life and the religious community but let me spell those out more clearly. Our purpose, as a religious community and as religious leaders, is to provoke experiences, feelings, and knowledge of transcendence and participation. We want our people to know that they are part of the Psyche Kosmos and that they have a unique purpose to their own life. We want to equip and encourage them to be in touch with the depth dimension of their lives (which they can access intentionally through spiritual practice), and to surface from that depth their own ethical and life wisdom.
We can and should achieve this goal through multiple means.
· Pastoral and spiritual care and guidance with individuals, families, and groups. Using tools like Tarot cards, Enneagram assessments, narrative therapy, prayer, meditation, journaling, and so forth, we can give individuals opportunities to explore their depth dimensions and respond to what they find there.
· We can co-create worship, art, and aesthetic experiences which provoke, describe, encourage, and create encounters with the Psyche Kosmos. Music, art, stories, myths, archetypes, and physical space all are pathways to this depth, as humans have known and experienced for millennia. We need powerful stories, images, and sounds which resonate and invite this life of meaning. This is true for adults and for children. To avoid both colonialism and appropriation, while being inclusive, we need to use our best knowledge and skill to present mythological and archetypal wisdom from many sources, both ancient and modern.
· We can ensure that our small group, religious education, and program materials reflect this aim. How are the conversations that we are convening encouraging attunement with depth and with the Psyche Kosmos?
· We can even more explicitly name and ground our work for justice in this theological vision. We can decry the idolatry of individualism (especially clear in the COVID and post-COVID era) and speak and organize on topics where interdependency is at stake (climate change, poverty, challenging white supremacy, corruption and democracy). We can also work in a way that honors creative and collaborative models (Emergent Strategy by adrianne marie brown indicates how to do this). Relatedly, the Psyche Kosmos is something we belong to that is larger than the partial, idolatrous sources of belonging that too many are turning to in our times: sources like race, politics, gender, and the like. Our loyalty should be larger.
· Most importantly, we can model this ourselves. We need to approach our preaching, writing, living, and relations grounded in the depth dimension, with poetic and mythic language, openness to mystery and consistently pointing toward the larger Anima Mundi of which we are a part. (I’ve always been very suspicious of “over-sharing” from the pastor’s life; I’ve witnessed this be a kind of narcissism and I find a lot of truth in David Buttrick’s argument about taking the focus off the message by inserting ourselves. But I’m coming to the conclusion that sharing more of our own journey toward depth is important — in the right place and time — and seeing how my 8w9 type drives my caution about self-disclosure as much as any philosophical position.)
But there’s no formula here. There’s no precise linguistic phrase for what I am describing, and no single practice I can recommend. Each person has their own purpose, and their own way of connecting with the collective unconscious, spirit of life, or way of things. That method depends on our personality type (one of at least 54 different types!), our life-stage, and our ethnic, gender, racial, and other identities. Some will find a pathway in science fiction, some in traditional myths, some in art, and some in silence. Some will be provoked by worship, some will find meaning in a small group meeting, some will pick up a book, and some will get a Tarot reading that changes their way of thinking and living. Sometimes the holy will shout, and sometimes it will whisper. The task is to find our own pathways, and to share the beauty, power, and truth of the journey itself.
The Psyche Kosmos, the one-ness of existence, is always in motion. Both shaped by and shaping all that is, it is not a fixed object but both a particle and a wave at once. A verb, not a noun. It is energy, in and among all that is, vibrating, resonating, and moving. So our spiritual work is not to arrive at a place and be done, but to seek to be attuned with and live in harmony with this ever-moving Soul of which we are a part — and that is part of us.
I’ll close by reminding myself, and any readers, that none of the work here is original. We are not creating the new, but recovering, connecting, and re-asserting what many spiritual and scientific teachers have been sharing. It is useful for me to compose this treatise, as evidence of some of what I have learned on my sabbatical; if it is useful to any others, then I am glad for it.
[1] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43650/auguries-of-innocence
[2] Note that Rick Riordan declined to write about the myths of non-European people but used his publishing power to share from folks in their own traditions. This is how it should be done.
[3] I am a social 8w9. The 8w9 is known as the Bear or the Diplomat. The social orientation means that I am concerned with protecting others from harm first, and myself second (though still concerned for myself, to be clear). As one commentator wrote “the 8w9 won’t start a fight but they will finish one.” Ministry channels my desire to control, lead, and protect into more spiritually mature pathways. Considering the topic of power, I have noted my own self-definition: “Channeling power from Brahman/Tao/Spirit, in ways that give and protect life, come into your bear-ness. Practice vulnerability without coercion, leadership without domination, and honesty without cruelty. Seek the honey (the joy and sweetness of life).”
