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http://themarknews.com/articles/103-cognitive-science-and-the-new-spirituality
5/5/09
There is an emerging framework for scientifically understanding how we fundamentally make sense of the world. Although there is much work to be done, there is now real promise that we are starting to understand how we understand – this promise creates opportunities that have profound existential, moral, and, for a lack of a better word, spiritual implications.
We are beginning to be able to explain how people can be intelligent beings (i.e. how they can sift through all the vast potential information available to them and zero in on what is relevant). Such relevance realization enables them to turn space into places, time into events, and causes into stories so that they can experience and think about their world. This enables them to size up situations, solve problems, and feel at home in the world.
Such fundamental framing enables them to realize patterns of relevance and thereby generate perspectives. The grasping of a perspective that enables one to see into a situation and solve problems is insight. Very often we (insightfully) realize, through a perspective, some purpose as relevant (i.e. we generate a role for ourselves). This is foresight. We can, most importantly, realize the relevance of one role to another and thus have the ability of mindsight. This is the ability to realize how the mental states of one’s self and others are relevant to each other. We create a sense of communion and communication (i.e. of communitas).
This recursive and self-organizing relevance realization (i.e. relevance realization within relevance realization within relevance realization), is probably what makes us intelligent and may even be an important part of what makes us conscious and self-aware beings.
This fundamental framing, however, will have great personal significance to people precisely because it is the process of creating personal significance and meaning. Such fundamental framing is what makes possible their world, their story, and their orientation to reality and sense of purpose. It makes possible their religio – their fundamental sense of connectedness to their world, their self, and to others. Such religio is distinct and deeper from the creedal, or "I believe," sense of religion.
It does connect up to some important ideas from the ancient Greek project of trying to cultivate wisdom and virtue. The Greeks had two terms for wisdom: sophia and phronesis. Sophia meant the grasping of deep principles (i.e. the ability to see deeply into reality and realize what is fundamental). Phronesis meant the ability to sense what is contextually appropriate and to act with finesse and grace in a current situation (i.e. to have insight into an on-going process and frame it well).
To cultivate wisdom was to cultivate sophia and phronesis and, most importantly, to cultivate their dynamic integration so that sophia was always helping to grow, enhance, and develop phronesis (which, in turn, was always helping to grow, enhance, and develop sophia). Wisdom involved not just learning new things and gaining knowledge, but acquiring new abilities to learn, realize relevance, and thereby realize principle within process. Wisdom therefore involves ekstasis – a sense of self-transcendence towards excellence of the self.
One way we can self-transcend is through mindsight (i.e. by creating resonance and co-ordination between minds so that they work together). This sense of communitas enables distributed cognition in which many minds are networked together so as to mutually enhance their overall problem solving abilities. Science itself is an example of communitas creating enormous problem solving abilities so as to tackle very complex and profound problems.
We are now in a position where such science is beginning to give us effective explanations of religio, sophia, phronesis, ekstasis, and communitas. So although science has deeply undermined the creedal aspects of most religions, it is beginning to provide us with ways to educate, cultivate, and enhance, wisdom, compassion, and a sense of connectedness and personal significance. Although we have lost the supernatural, we are beginning to see how we could become extraordinary.
We must not give up on the pursuit of the extraordinary, because we have seen through the illusion of the supernatural. Seeing through such illusion provides an opportunity for extraordinary insight, foresight, mindsight, for extraordinary rationality and self-transcendence, for extraordinary psychophysical co-ordination, for extraordinary self-awareness and self-control, for extraordinary wisdom, compassion, grace, and communitas.
We have the possibility of founding a religio that can grow with science and can realize an ataraxia (peace of mind and sense of harmony with one’s world) that is consonant with the growth of knowledge and understanding.
There are possibilities that such cultivations can be enhanced by neuro-feedback, biofeedback (both being therapy techniques that offer real-time feedback on brainwave activity), and cyber-enhancement, so that individuals have available to them opportunities for tremendous self-transformations in sophia, phronesis, ekstasis and communitas that could enhance the breadth and depth of their lives.
We will only wean people off magical thinking by giving them such profound meaning. We must glean, with respect and understanding, from the religions of the past their remaining functionality. We have a history of such respectful gleaning. We have secularized education, art, government, medicine, counseling, and social welfare, but in spite of all of this, religion persists. Some of this is due to irrationality, fear, and hatred. But some of it is due to the remaining functions of religio, viz, the cultivation of sophia, phronesis, ekstasis, and communitas, all present within religion. These functions must be gleaned from religion with a neuro-spirituality that is always in concert with our best cognitive and neuro-science, with our best social psychology and anthropology. This is our great hope.
This is a rational hope for a rational renewal of religio. This is a way that can be followed with open eyes and hearts by those who are awake to what is scientifically known and to what is philosophically plausible.
We must acknowledge and thank religion for what it cultivated. We must stop trying to refute religion, for this is a form of self-denial of our past and our potential. We must always challenge supernatural claims and super-epistemic beliefs. But we must realize that a belief in magic threatens not only science but is also a perversion of the quest for wisdom, and this perversion is the life-blood of the belief. We will only drain the life from magic if we give people the rationally extraordinary pursuit of sophia, phronesis, ekstasis, and communitas. We must demonstrate the courage and creativity of providing such a way to people if we are going to free the world from the perils of religion.
It is time that we realized and proclaimed the promise of a new spirituality – available to us if we but commit ourselves to this worthy task.
