Tag: patriarchy

EVOLUTION AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Dear Friends,

On September 7 the London Free Press published my article below under the title “Evolution leads to cosmic consciousness”

It is 689 words, so when you have 2 minutes, why not give it a quick read?

Blessings and peace,

Bruce Tallman

Spiritual Director

www.brucetallman.com

Mystics give us a bigger vision of where we are evolving

    Sri Aurobindo was a Hindu mystic. Teilhard de Chardin was a Christian mystic. They never knew of the other’s work. Despite this, they both came to the same momentous conclusion. The direction of evolution is toward divinization. This means God is fully alive in every human being.

    In books like The Future Evolution of Man (Aurobindo) and The Phenomenon of Man (Teilhard), they both outlined the earthly process. It moves from rocks and water (matter) to plants (sensitivity). Then it progresses to animals (feelings), leading to humans (thought). Finally, it reaches the spread of the great religions (spirit). The goal of evolution is greater and greater consciousness, from matter to spirit. We are heading towards God (Cosmic Consciousness) being all in all.

    Of course, since we have free will, if we choose hate and war over love and peace, we could destroy ourselves. The planet might be destroyed with us. Divinization is not a guaranteed process.

    In the past one hundred or so years new technologies such as radio, television, Internet, smartphones, and now artificial intelligence have been growing our consciousness at light-speed. These are all new stages of the world-wide evolution of humanity.

    Mystics and scientists have come to the same conclusion: everything is interconnected and one. The pandemic also forced unitive thinking on us: we are all in this together. As well the climate crisis forces us to see our interconnectivity: our energy use affects everything else.

    Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, has written about order, disorder, and re-order. For hundreds of years white males have dominated the planet, making decisions affecting everyone. The modern means of communication, particularly the Internet, have gradually dissolved this domination, allowing suppressed voices to speak: women, blacks, indigenous, and LGBTQ2SA+ people. All these new voices have also expanded our consciousness. Domination by white males is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

    Our consciousness is expanding. We are now aware of stages of faith. The group stage loves order and simply believes what others say. The personal stage loves asking questions and deconstructing everything, particularly religion. At this stage people often feel they are losing their religion and leave their church, synagogue, mosque, or temple. This stage however is in danger of getting stuck in disorder. And disorder is the case for many young people today – they have never experienced even the group stage of faith and so have no spiritual foundation to build their lives on. 

    The final stage of faith is mysticism where you accept that those previous stages had their role to play. As Rohr says, you need somewhere to discover that some things are holy, and church is a good place to start. But the mature person grows their consciousness beyond that and eventually realizes that everything is holy: every creature is a face of God. The local church still has a role to play however: starting people on the road to oneness, holiness, justice, and mysticism.

    White male domination now senses that all these new voices are creating disorder and is trying to re-establish their authority and order, for example, “Make America Great Again,” or by arch-conservative bishops in the Catholic church trying to take the church back to the 1950s, before Vatican II (1962-65), which they perceive as disorder. But history always works as a spiral: two steps forward, one back, but ever onward (unless we destroy it).

    The Spirit of God is moving us inexorably towards re-order – towards unity, mysticism, and justice for all voices. This is what people like Aurobindo, Teilhard, Thomas Merton (a Catholic monk), Rohr, Matthew Fox (an Anglican priest), Brian McLaren (a Protestant minister), and Ilia Delio (a Franciscan sister and expert on Teilhard), advocate in their many books.

    Pope Francis also advocates this in his attempt to make the church “synodal,” that is, one where lay Catholics have a voice in church governance, not just priests and bishops. Despite this being opposed as disorder by some bishops, the church will likely continue on its road to inclusion, unity, and mysticism as this seems to be where God is leading it, and all of evolution.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and religious educator of adults. http://www.brucetallman.com

Spiritual Warriors: Beyond Patriarchy and Pleasure

In medieval royal courts, the joker/jester

was seen as a symbol of Christ –

pricking the balloon of patriarchal pomposity

overturning people’s applecarts

and worldviews –

Christ was and still is the glittering joker

dancing in the dragon’s jaws –

laughing at the precariousness of life

when Eternity is at hand

when we let go of patriarchy

we do not abandon ourselves to evil

we come home to a relational God

who created relational human beings

who enjoy pleasure

but “If we abandon ourselves to pleasure alone

the pleasure principle leads to despair 

since life becomes meaningless” 

– Seneca, Stoic philosopher

we also need to reclaim the warrior archetype 

from the military

we need to fight against the war machine and injustice

for the true warrior is spiritual –

true mystics and prophets are spiritual warriors

Mohammed was a spiritual warrior

and, by the grace of God, a genius of literature –

it is not just the message

but the fusion of poetry and prose

that makes the Quran a masterpiece

Mohammed, like Moses and Jesus

created not just a ‘revival’ but also an ‘awakening’ –

revivals are personal/emotional conversions 

of individuals –

awakenings are cultural revitalizations

that restructure not only social institutions

but also the very purposes and goals 

of civilizations.

FALLING AND RISING CONSCIOUSNESS

 

If there is such a thing, “original sin” would be the fall

of the human person from contemplative union with God

and “kyriarchy” would be the fall from union with others –

it is “lordship” – it goes beyond male patriarchy –

white women have lorded it over

both black women and black men for centuries –

lordship is a deeper problem than patriarchy

 

Ken Wilber’s Integral Vision has color-coded levels

of consciousness that explain all our falls and risings

and cause us to interpret divine beings differently

depending on our level:

red: the magic Jesus

amber: Jesus the lawgiver

orange: Jesus the world wisdom teacher

green: Jesus the savior through multiple paths

turquoise: Christ-consciousness in all people

violet: Jesus the Eternal Self beyond all suffering

 

similarly, the Enneagram, a powerful tool for alleviating suffering

distinguishes three different types of human beings:

gut/sexual

heart/social

head/self-preserving

who develop/grow/love in different ways

 

since love is the drawing and driving force

which activates and empowers the universe

it is seemingly contradicted

by “survival of the fittest”

plus nature’s other ways of being violent:

volcanoes/hurricanes/tornadoes/earthquakes –

but love is not always a purely positive force –

it often involves suffering in its movement

towards greater wholeness/greater being

 

in all our ordinary activities

sin and grace contend

so what we need is sober realism

rooted in the hope the Holy Spirit gives us

rather than naïve optimism – we need to:

despite trying family problems exercise charity

despite deadening routine find meaning

despite the frustrations of daily life nurture contemplation

despite powerful oppressive systems work for justice.

YOUR TRUE CALLING

Rosemary Radford Ruether, the great feminist theologian

was one of the first to see patriarchal/dualistic thinking –

that things are divided not one –

causes not only sexism but also racism and environmental destruction

 

theology itself can be patriarchal/dualistic

if it does not paradoxically give up

what it has always asked other disciplines to give up: supremacy –

like all sciences it must submit to the greater wisdom

of evolutionary cosmology – the blueprint of the universe –

the unrelenting progress from atoms to humans to divinized humans –

astronomy blesses us with a scientific revelation of God’s Plan

 

whereas classical thermodynamics said closed systems dissipate energy

and thus the whole cosmos is winding down –

which breeds nihilism – we are ultimately doomed so why care about anything?

but biologist Ludwig von Bertalanffy, inventor of General Systems Theory

revealed that open systems do not run down

because they get new energy from their environment

 

but systems are not The System that wants to fool us and rule us –

the culture we live in is deceptive and hegemonic –

“We need Christ and the poet/artist/mystic to give us liberated vision –

new ways to see” – Canadian folk legend Bruce Cockburn

 

the journey to find new ways to see

the departure of the hero on the Hero’s Journey – has sub-stages:

The Call

The Refusal of the Call (and the folly/futility of resistance)

Supernatural Aid

Descent into the Night:

God calls Moses to free the Israelites from slavery in Egypt

Moses says “No way, I cannot go, who am I to challenge Pharaoh?”

God says “I will be with you”

Moses leaves for Egypt and the rest is history

 

“The True Calling for all of us is the Present Moment –

that’s why they call it the “Present” – the “Gift from God” –

the bigger miracle is not for one person to walk on water

but for all of us to walk on our blue/green planet

in the Eternal Now”

– Thich Nhat Hanh

 

if you live in the One and the Now

dualistic thinking has no power over your True Calling.