Naturalistic Paganism

Reaching inward, we discover our participation in something greater than what we normally call ourselves.

– by B. T. Newberg

This post concludes the series on transcendence in naturalism.  Part 1 introduced naturalistic transcendence, part 2 covered nature as a source of transcendence, and part 3 explored community.  Now we conclude with mind.

In our recent poll on symbols of transcendence, nature proved the most popular, with cosmos a close second.  One that didn’t rate highly was mind.  Perhaps it should come as no surprise.  On the face of it, the very idea of it seems absurd: how could you possibly find something greater than yourself in, well… yourself?

But that’s exactly the misconception I seek to challenge: mind is not ourselves, or at least not what we routinely think of as such.

We are not our minds

What most of us, most of the time, think of as ourselves is more or less our conscious ego, especially the part where we feel like we’re thinking, willing, imagining, feeling, remembering, deliberating, and so on.  It’s our most immediate experience, and it’s what we may fear ceasing to exist after death.  However, this represents only a tiny fraction of the total process of an individual’s mind.

The unconscious is far more vast.  To give a taste: cognitive psychologist Timothy D. Wilson estimates in Strangers to Ourselves that our minds assimilate some 11,000,000 pieces of information per second from our sense organs, but only about 40 can be processed consciously.  The rest, according to Wilson, are handled by the unconscious.

There may even be parts of the mental process external to the individual body.  The field of embodied cognition studies the mind in its holistic interaction with body and environment.  Clark and Chalmers even go so far as to ask whether there is any difference between storing information in memory or in a notebook.  Such mental prostheses, they argue, free up mental processing space by offloading some of it into the environment.  This is a controversial claim, but one worth a moment’s pondering.

By mind I mean the whole mind of the individual, conscious and unconscious.  You could also say psyche, a term more popular in Jungian psychology.  It is the root of psychology, and originally meant “soul.”  Psyche is one of many words that have been thoroughly naturalized, just as “god” and “spirit” may one day come to be.

Deep and vast

So, the other parts of the mind do a lot, but do they do anything interesting, or just take care of the tedious stuff?

Consider this: Where do your words come from when you speak?  You may have a vague plan of the idea you want to convey, but do you consciously decide the words or even the nuances of the ideas?  Or do you discover these things in the process of speaking?

Ancient poets like Homer and Hesiod claimed to receive their lines from a muse.  Perhaps, in some sense, they were right.  The “muse” lies in the unconscious.  In a similar vein, Carl Jung said we are not the authors of our thoughts; they are handed to us.  I tend to agree.

Jung also felt that messages from the unconscious await us in our dreams, and such content somehow “compensates” or balances the conscious mind.  I’m not sure how to test that claim, so I remain skeptical.  It may be a case of seeking pattern where there is none.  But there is one thing that experience has proven to me time and again: my unconscious mind can do certain things that “I” can’t.

A power beyond “me”

When I sit down at my Isis altar with an emotional knot that I’ve been working on for days without resolution, and that knot looses within minutes of chanting and talking to Isis, it’s hard to argue with that.

Somehow, an unconscious process is facilitated by the images and actions involved in devotion.  Perhaps the image of a supernormal mother figure like Isis and the bodily actions of rhythmic chanting, gift offering, and intimate confession are mental prostheses in the manner proposed by Clark and Chalmers.  Ritual devotion may not be unique in its ability to facilitate this, but it appears to be one way to do it, and an effective one in my experience.

I’m sure other people’s experiences with ritual may be quite different.  Regardless, this example demonstrates, like a pebble cast into a well, just how far down the unconscious mind goes.  It is not “me”; it is radically “other.”  It is greater in both degree and kind.  To sound its depths is indeed to discover something greater than oneself.

So, although mind did not rate highly on our poll, I’d like to suggest reconsidering it, not only because it is perhaps the most well-established among naturalists (via Jungian Paganism), but also because it helps us to discover transcendence “closer than your own jugular.”

Through participation in nature, we take part in the evolving process of life itself.

– by B. T. Newberg

This post continues the series on transcendence in naturalism.  Part 1 introduced naturalistic transcendence.  Part 3 will cover community, and part 4 will delve into mind.

Nature

In our modern parlance, nature connotes that part of the environment which is beyond the domesticated human sphere.  In its broader and more original sense, though, nature is quite simply all that is.

Those are two different meanings, and their tension is instructive.  The former is an “other”, the latter a oneness that transcends self and other.  This is a dynamic that proves characteristic of transcendence.

In encountering wild nature, that which is quite other than our usual domestic, artificial, controlled habitat, we may become aware of an acute alienation, a sense of distance.  In perceiving the vastness of nature, its scale and ancientness, we feel small by comparison.  “Creature feeling” may overwhelm us, to use the term of Rudolf Otto.  An experience of the numinous* may arise as we behold the mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

Then, in contemplating how we too are a part of that vastness, how we have come out of it, belong to it, and contribute to it with every thought and action, the natural/artificial duality erodes.  An experience of the mystical* may arise as individual identity dissolves and a sense of participation pervades nature.

Finally, as we attempt to integrate this insight into our identity, an experience of the visionary* may arise as inspiration flashes before us our true place in nature and how we ought to live our lives in consequence.  Integration affirms the worth of the individual even as it appropriately subordinates it to the whole.

This kind of experience can happen whether looking into the eyes of a wolf, as in Aldo Leopold’s hunting experience, or gazing at the farthest reaches of the galaxy, as in Neil deGrasse Tyson’s “most astounding fact.”

Life and evolution

Insight into our relationship with nature can be aided by examining the concept itself.  When we delve into its history, we find nature is not so much a thing as a process.

Our word “nature” comes from the Latin natura, which translates the Greek physis (whence we get “physics”).  Gerard Naddaf explains in The Greek Concept of Nature that this word first appears in Homer as the intrinsic way of growth of a particular species of plant.  As the term is picked up by philosophy, it continues to refer to how a thing comes to be of its own accord.

This emphasis on growth, on the dynamic self-unfolding of a thing, captures the process of life.  It remains more or less intact in our concept of nature today, and is nowhere better embodied than the theory of evolution.

Thus, when we speak of participation in nature, we speak of taking part in the evolving process of life itself.  We join in what Karl E. Peters calls “dancing with the sacred.”

Cosmos

With the beholding of our place in the marvelous unfolding of existence, nature becomes cosmos.  This is a term most employed at the universal scale these days, but it’s actual meaning is an ordered, beautiful world:

cosmos.  from Gk. kosmos “order, good order, orderly arrangement,” a word with several main senses rooted in those notions: The verb kosmein meant generally “to dispose, prepare,” but especially “to order and arrange (troops for battle), to set (an army) in array;” also “to establish (a government or regime);” “to deck, adorn, equip, dress” (especially of women). Thus kosmos had an important secondary sense of “ornaments of a woman’s dress, decoration” (cf. kosmokomes “dressing the hair”) as well as “the universe, the world.” (Online Etymology Dictionary)

When we speak of cosmos, then, we speak of “good order” and, anthropomorphically, the ornamented “dress, decoration” and beautiful “hair” of our mother, nature.

We are participants in that beautiful order, one of the flecks in one of the diamonds in one of the barrettes in her flowing hair.

* numinous, mystical, visionary: Religious experiences as defined in Loyal Rue’s Religion Is Not About God:

In numinous experiences the subject-object distinction is preserved, even amplified, as the subject is filled with intense love and peace that comes with a sense of the presence of a holy and awesome transcendent power.  …

Mystical experiences are characterized by the annihilation of conscious distinction between subject and object, self and world.  The mystic enters an altered state of pure unified consciousness wherein all reality, the self included, is immediately and blissfully apprehended as essential oneness.  …

Visionary, or prophetic, experiences are often characterized by a trance-like state in which the seer receives a concrete message or vision communicated directly from an irresistible transcendent source.