Some ways to add the necessary "magnesium" (or to lower the bullshit meter)
1. Deal with this from Sri Aurobindo: "The age of religions is over." Is what you're doing really suitably confined within the category of "religion?" Liz Bucar is doing a "religion reimagined" substack, and seems to think remaining "metaphysically agnostic" is the solution - what she's left with is the soulless Unitarian Universalist version - leave out the belief and dogma, keep the community and ethical concern (as well as some pretty bad music) and if you want to believe in God, or earth goddess, or just kindness and goodness, and basically be a nice safe academic liberal progressive, that's fine (the "religion" of Wendy Doniger and the University of Chicago!!) Then why "religion" at all? Why not just go full blown Ethical culture?
2. Parapsychology, occult, other worlds - virtually every spiritual tradition, indigenous as well, took for granted beings and worlds that are non -physical. Is it fear of being non academic, non scientific, that prevents one from tackling what has scientific evidence for it better than most things in my field of psychology.
3 Evolution: whether it's evolutionary panentheism, or just the general idea of a telos in evolution, an involved consciousness slowly emerging, and not the Whiteheadian "God is growing too" but maintaining what Krishna reveals at the end of chapter 10 of the Gita: "with an infinitesimal drop of my Being, I manifest this and all possibly universes, yet I remain (or "yet I AM")
4. A new species. This is a fun one. Sri Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa propose that a "supramental consciousness' has descended in the collective consciousness of the planet, leading to a transformation not yet even addressed in any spiritual tradition, which will ultimately lead to the emergence of a new species beyond humanity.
Those are a few good ones for a start. i don't see anywhere on substack (or really, almost anywhere on the net - including no matter how much you push Claude or chatGPT to get into this) where this is being addressed, in accessible everyday language, to any extent.
Thanks Don, lots of great stuff here, especially the evolutionary and UU questions — both of which were already on my radar, but you articulating them here makes me even more interested in wading in. I have long said that I am theologically Universalist but spiritually Catholic — not sure exactly what that means in terms of the rubber hitting the road, but I think it's something I will be poking at in the months to come (this is related to my increasing sense that I am a "feral" contemplative, another topic for future/further exploration). Stay tuned and keep the comments coming, knowing what readers are interested in is really helpful as I try to parse out my limited writing time in as useful a way as possible!
Hi Carl - I was trying to think of a relevant comment that wouldn't challenge your limited writing time too much - and this just came to me:
I was music director for Our Lady of Guadalupe in lower Manhattan through the 1980s, a Spanish Catholic church. My favorite priest was Father Alphege, the only priest there who both knew and practiced the deepest contemplative practices of the church (in the early 80s, he invited me to the first "Centering Prayer" mass every held, led by Father Basil Pennington). Father Alphege had been a scholar of Greek and Latin, teaching it at a rather prestigious Catholic school near Boston before being sent to serve a poor Hispanic community in Nueva York.
I frequently shared with Father Alphege my own contemplative investigations, which tended to be universalist, but I loved Christian contemplative spirituality and was deeply impressed by the Christian calendar which I had only begun learning about as music director. One day I gave him a series of essays by Sri Krishna Prem (born Ronald Nixon, the first westerner ever accepted in the devotional "Vaishnava" tradition of India).
Prem touched on most of the themes I spoke of above, including universal spirituality beyond religion, the reality of the occult and the absolute necessity of the true contemplative to be rooted in genuine Divine Love so as not to get lost in what will almost inevitably be a passage through or at least some contact with the subliminal/hidden realms of the individual and collective consciousness, and the fact of what an evolution of consciousness means for humanity at large.
Father Alphege was deeply touched by this, though as a scholar he was amused that "Krishna Prem clearly has profound spiritual vision while he does not follow most academic conventions!"
Touching on the core of Christian and even more specifically, Catholic spirituality, while acknowledging these other issues which are so central to the search of so many of the "nones" today would, I think, have made Father Alphege quite happy:>)))))
Some ways to add the necessary "magnesium" (or to lower the bullshit meter)
1. Deal with this from Sri Aurobindo: "The age of religions is over." Is what you're doing really suitably confined within the category of "religion?" Liz Bucar is doing a "religion reimagined" substack, and seems to think remaining "metaphysically agnostic" is the solution - what she's left with is the soulless Unitarian Universalist version - leave out the belief and dogma, keep the community and ethical concern (as well as some pretty bad music) and if you want to believe in God, or earth goddess, or just kindness and goodness, and basically be a nice safe academic liberal progressive, that's fine (the "religion" of Wendy Doniger and the University of Chicago!!) Then why "religion" at all? Why not just go full blown Ethical culture?
2. Parapsychology, occult, other worlds - virtually every spiritual tradition, indigenous as well, took for granted beings and worlds that are non -physical. Is it fear of being non academic, non scientific, that prevents one from tackling what has scientific evidence for it better than most things in my field of psychology.
3 Evolution: whether it's evolutionary panentheism, or just the general idea of a telos in evolution, an involved consciousness slowly emerging, and not the Whiteheadian "God is growing too" but maintaining what Krishna reveals at the end of chapter 10 of the Gita: "with an infinitesimal drop of my Being, I manifest this and all possibly universes, yet I remain (or "yet I AM")
4. A new species. This is a fun one. Sri Aurobindo and Mirra Alfassa propose that a "supramental consciousness' has descended in the collective consciousness of the planet, leading to a transformation not yet even addressed in any spiritual tradition, which will ultimately lead to the emergence of a new species beyond humanity.
Those are a few good ones for a start. i don't see anywhere on substack (or really, almost anywhere on the net - including no matter how much you push Claude or chatGPT to get into this) where this is being addressed, in accessible everyday language, to any extent.
Thanks Don, lots of great stuff here, especially the evolutionary and UU questions — both of which were already on my radar, but you articulating them here makes me even more interested in wading in. I have long said that I am theologically Universalist but spiritually Catholic — not sure exactly what that means in terms of the rubber hitting the road, but I think it's something I will be poking at in the months to come (this is related to my increasing sense that I am a "feral" contemplative, another topic for future/further exploration). Stay tuned and keep the comments coming, knowing what readers are interested in is really helpful as I try to parse out my limited writing time in as useful a way as possible!
Hi Carl - I was trying to think of a relevant comment that wouldn't challenge your limited writing time too much - and this just came to me:
I was music director for Our Lady of Guadalupe in lower Manhattan through the 1980s, a Spanish Catholic church. My favorite priest was Father Alphege, the only priest there who both knew and practiced the deepest contemplative practices of the church (in the early 80s, he invited me to the first "Centering Prayer" mass every held, led by Father Basil Pennington). Father Alphege had been a scholar of Greek and Latin, teaching it at a rather prestigious Catholic school near Boston before being sent to serve a poor Hispanic community in Nueva York.
I frequently shared with Father Alphege my own contemplative investigations, which tended to be universalist, but I loved Christian contemplative spirituality and was deeply impressed by the Christian calendar which I had only begun learning about as music director. One day I gave him a series of essays by Sri Krishna Prem (born Ronald Nixon, the first westerner ever accepted in the devotional "Vaishnava" tradition of India).
Prem touched on most of the themes I spoke of above, including universal spirituality beyond religion, the reality of the occult and the absolute necessity of the true contemplative to be rooted in genuine Divine Love so as not to get lost in what will almost inevitably be a passage through or at least some contact with the subliminal/hidden realms of the individual and collective consciousness, and the fact of what an evolution of consciousness means for humanity at large.
Father Alphege was deeply touched by this, though as a scholar he was amused that "Krishna Prem clearly has profound spiritual vision while he does not follow most academic conventions!"
Touching on the core of Christian and even more specifically, Catholic spirituality, while acknowledging these other issues which are so central to the search of so many of the "nones" today would, I think, have made Father Alphege quite happy:>)))))
Carl, a honest observation. It reminded me of the times I read. Merton and find in his few words exposing some "spiritual gameplay" in my life.
Well, it's an honor to be compared to Merton on any day! 😎