Quotes & Sayings


We, and creation itself, actualize the possibilities of the God who sustains the world, towards becoming in the world in a fuller, more deeper way. - R.E. Slater

There is urgency in coming to see the world as a web of interrelated processes of which we are integral parts, so that all of our choices and actions have [consequential effects upon] the world around us. - Process Metaphysician Alfred North Whitehead

Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem says (i) all closed systems are unprovable within themselves and, that (ii) all open systems are rightly understood as incomplete. - R.E. Slater

The most true thing about you is what God has said to you in Christ, "You are My Beloved." - Tripp Fuller

The God among us is the God who refuses to be God without us, so great is God's Love. - Tripp Fuller

According to some Christian outlooks we were made for another world. Perhaps, rather, we were made for this world to recreate, reclaim, redeem, and renew unto God's future aspiration by the power of His Spirit. - R.E. Slater

Our eschatological ethos is to love. To stand with those who are oppressed. To stand against those who are oppressing. It is that simple. Love is our only calling and Christian Hope. - R.E. Slater

Secularization theory has been massively falsified. We don't live in an age of secularity. We live in an age of explosive, pervasive religiosity... an age of religious pluralism. - Peter L. Berger

Exploring the edge of life and faith in a post-everything world. - Todd Littleton

I don't need another reason to believe, your love is all around for me to see. – Anon

Thou art our need; and in giving us more of thyself thou givest us all. - Khalil Gibran, Prayer XXIII

Be careful what you pretend to be. You become what you pretend to be. - Kurt Vonnegut

Religious beliefs, far from being primary, are often shaped and adjusted by our social goals. - Jim Forest

We become who we are by what we believe and can justify. - R.E. Slater

People, even more than things, need to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed; never throw out anyone. – Anon

Certainly, God's love has made fools of us all. - R.E. Slater

An apocalyptic Christian faith doesn't wait for Jesus to come, but for Jesus to become in our midst. - R.E. Slater

Christian belief in God begins with the cross and resurrection of Jesus, not with rational apologetics. - Eberhard Jüngel, Jürgen Moltmann

Our knowledge of God is through the 'I-Thou' encounter, not in finding God at the end of a syllogism or argument. There is a grave danger in any Christian treatment of God as an object. The God of Jesus Christ and Scripture is irreducibly subject and never made as an object, a force, a power, or a principle that can be manipulated. - Emil Brunner

“Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh” means "I will be that who I have yet to become." - God (Ex 3.14) or, conversely, “I AM who I AM Becoming.”

Our job is to love others without stopping to inquire whether or not they are worthy. - Thomas Merton

The church is God's world-changing social experiment of bringing unlikes and differents to the Eucharist/Communion table to share life with one another as a new kind of family. When this happens, we show to the world what love, justice, peace, reconciliation, and life together is designed by God to be. The church is God's show-and-tell for the world to see how God wants us to live as a blended, global, polypluralistic family united with one will, by one Lord, and baptized by one Spirit. – Anon

The cross that is planted at the heart of the history of the world cannot be uprooted. - Jacques Ellul

The Unity in whose loving presence the universe unfolds is inside each person as a call to welcome the stranger, protect animals and the earth, respect the dignity of each person, think new thoughts, and help bring about ecological civilizations. - John Cobb & Farhan A. Shah

If you board the wrong train it is of no use running along the corridors of the train in the other direction. - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

God's justice is restorative rather than punitive; His discipline is merciful rather than punishing; His power is made perfect in weakness; and His grace is sufficient for all. – Anon

Our little [biblical] systems have their day; they have their day and cease to be. They are but broken lights of Thee, and Thou, O God art more than they. - Alfred Lord Tennyson

We can’t control God; God is uncontrollable. God can’t control us; God’s love is uncontrolling! - Thomas Jay Oord

Life in perspective but always in process... as we are relational beings in process to one another, so life events are in process in relation to each event... as God is to Self, is to world, is to us... like Father, like sons and daughters, like events... life in process yet always in perspective. - R.E. Slater

To promote societal transition to sustainable ways of living and a global society founded on a shared ethical framework which includes respect and care for the community of life, ecological integrity, universal human rights, respect for diversity, economic justice, democracy, and a culture of peace. - The Earth Charter Mission Statement

Christian humanism is the belief that human freedom, individual conscience, and unencumbered rational inquiry are compatible with the practice of Christianity or even intrinsic in its doctrine. It represents a philosophical union of Christian faith and classical humanist principles. - Scott Postma

It is never wise to have a self-appointed religious institution determine a nation's moral code. The opportunities for moral compromise and failure are high; the moral codes and creeds assuredly racist, discriminatory, or subjectively and religiously defined; and the pronouncement of inhumanitarian political objectives quite predictable. - R.E. Slater

God's love must both center and define the Christian faith and all religious or human faiths seeking human and ecological balance in worlds of subtraction, harm, tragedy, and evil. - R.E. Slater

In Whitehead’s process ontology, we can think of the experiential ground of reality as an eternal pulse whereby what is objectively public in one moment becomes subjectively prehended in the next, and whereby the subject that emerges from its feelings then perishes into public expression as an object (or “superject”) aiming for novelty. There is a rhythm of Being between object and subject, not an ontological division. This rhythm powers the creative growth of the universe from one occasion of experience to the next. This is the Whiteheadian mantra: “The many become one and are increased by one.” - Matthew Segall

Without Love there is no Truth. And True Truth is always Loving. There is no dichotomy between these terms but only seamless integration. This is the premier centering focus of a Processual Theology of Love. - R.E. Slater

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Note: Generally I do not respond to commentary. I may read the comments but wish to reserve my time to write (or write off the comments I read). Instead, I'd like to see our community help one another and in the helping encourage and exhort each of us towards Christian love in Christ Jesus our Lord and Savior. - re slater

Wednesday, August 26, 2020

Wikipedia - Cosmic Consciousness


Holistic Concept of Cosmic Consciousness within and between All Things


Cosmic Consciousness

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Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind
Cosmic Consciousness (first edition title page).jpg
The title page
AuthorRichard Maurice Bucke
LanguageEnglish
SubjectConsciousness
Published1901
Media typePrint
Cosmic Consciousness: A Study in the Evolution of the Human Mind is a 1901 book by the psychiatrist Richard Maurice Bucke, in which the author explores the concept of cosmic consciousness, which he defines as "a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man".

Forms of consciousness

In Cosmic Consciousness, Bucke stated that he discerned three forms, or degrees, of consciousness:[1]
  • Simple consciousness, possessed by both animals and mankind
  • Self-consciousness, possessed by mankind, encompassing thought, reason, and imagination
  • Cosmic consciousness, which is "a higher form of consciousness than that possessed by the ordinary man" [2]
According to Bucke,
This consciousness shows the cosmos to consist not of dead matter governed by unconscious, rigid, and unintending law; it shows it on the contrary as entirely immaterial, entirely spiritual and entirely alive; it shows that death is an absurdity, that everyone and everything has eternal life; it shows that the universe is God and that God is the universe, and that no evil ever did or ever will enter into it; a great deal of this is, of course, from the point of view of self consciousness, absurd; it is nevertheless undoubtedly true.[3]
Moores said that Bucke's cosmic consciousness is an interconnected way of seeing things "which is more of an intuitive knowing than it is a factual understanding".[4] Moores pointed out that, for scholars of the purist camp, the experience of cosmic consciousness is incomplete without the element of love, "which is the foundation of mystical consciousness":[5]
Mysticism, then, is the perception of the universe and all of its seemingly disparate entities existing in a unified whole bound together by love.[6]
Juan A. Herrero Brasas said that Bucke's cosmic consciousness refers to the evolution of the intellect, and not to "the ineffable revelation of hidden truths".[7] According to Brasas, it was William James who equated Bucke's cosmic consciousness with mystical experience or mystical consciousness.[7] Gary Lachman notes that today Bucke's experience would most likely be "explained" by the so-called "God spot", or more generally as a case of temporal lobe epilepsy, but he is skeptical of these and other "organic" explanations.[8]
Bucke identified only male examples of cosmic consciousness. He believed that women were not likely to have it.[9] (However, there are some women amongst the "additional cases" listed in the second half of the book.)
He regarded Walt Whitman as "the climax of religious evolution and the harbinger of humanity's future".[10]

Similar concepts

William James

According to Michael RobertsonCosmic Consciousness and William James's book The Varieties of Religious Experience have much in common:[11]
Both Bucke and James argue that all religions, no matter how seemingly different, have a common core; both believe that it is possible to identify this core by stripping away institutional accretions of dogma and ritual and focusing on individual experience; and both identify mystical illumination as the foundation of all religious experience.[11]
James popularized the concept of religious experience,[note 1] which he explored in The Varieties of Religious Experience.[13][14] He saw mysticism as a distinctive experience which supplies knowledge of the transcendental.[15] He considered the "personal religion"[16] to be "more fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism",[16] and states:
In mystic states we both become one with the Absolute and we become aware of our oneness. This is the everlasting and triumphant mystical tradition, hardly altered by differences of clime or creed. In Hinduism, in Neoplatonism, in Sufism, in Christian mysticism, in Whitmanism, we find the same recurring note, so that there is about mystical utterances an eternal unanimity which ought to make a critic stop and think, and which bring it about that the mystical classics have, as been said, neither birthday nor native land.[17]
Regarding cosmic consciousness, William James, in his essay The Confidences of a "Psychical Researcher", wrote:
What again, are the relations between the cosmic consciousness and matter? ... So that our ordinary human experience, on its material as well as on its mental side, would appear to be only an extract from the larger psycho-physical world?[18]

Collective consciousness

James understood "cosmic consciousness" to be a collective consciousness, a "larger reservoir of consciousness",[19] which manifests itself in the minds of men and remains intact after the dissolution of the individual. It may "retain traces of the life history of its individual emanation".[19]

Friedrich Schleiermacher

A classification similar to that proposed by Bucke was used by the influential theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), viz.:[20]
  • Animal, brutish self-awareness
  • Sensual consciousness
  • Higher self-consciousness
In Schleiermacher's theology, higher consciousness "is the part of the human being that is capable of transcending animal instincts".[21] It is the "point of contact with God" and the essence of being human.[21]
When higher consciousness is present, people are not alienated from God by their instincts.[21] The relation between higher and lower consciousness is akin to St. Paul's "struggle of the spirit to overcome the flesh".[21] Higher consciousness establishes a distinction between the natural and the spiritual sides of human beings.[22]
The concept of religious experience was used by Schleiermacher and by Albert Ritschl to defend religion against scientific and secular criticism and to defend the belief that moral and religious experiences justify religious beliefs.[14]

Other writers

Cosmic consciousness bears similarity to Hegel's Geist:[23][24]
All this seems to force upon us an interpretation of Hegel that would understand his term "min" as some kind of cosmic consciousness; not, of course, a traditional conception of God as a being separate from the universe, but rather as something more akin to those eastern philosophies that insist that All is One.[24]
Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the noösphere also bears similarity to Bucke's ideas.[citation needed]
According to Paul Marshall, a philosopher of religion, cosmic consciousness bears resemblances to some traditional pantheist beliefs.[25]
Ken Wilber, integral philosopher and mystic, identifies four state/stages of cosmic consciousness (mystical experience) above both Gebser's integral level and Beck and Cowan's turquoise level.[27]

Influence

Others who have used the concept of cosmic consciousness, as introduced by Bucke in 1901, include Albert EinsteinPierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Alan Watts.Some modern psychologists and theologians have made reference to Bucke’s work. They include Erich FrommRobert S. de Ropp, and Abraham Maslow.

See also

References

  1. ^ Bucke 2009, p. 1-3.
  2. ^ Bucke 2009, p. 1.
  3. ^ Bucke 2009, p. 17–18.
  4. ^ Moores 2006, p. 33.
  5. ^ Moores 2005, p. 33.
  6. ^ Moores 2005, p. 34.
  7. Jump up to:a b Brasas 2010, p. 53.
  8. ^ Lachman 2003, p. 7.
  9. ^ Robertson 2010, p. 134.
  10. ^ Robertson 2010, p. 135.
  11. Jump up to:a b Robertson 2010, p. 133.
  12. ^ Samy 1998, p. 80.
  13. ^ Hori 1999, p. 47.
  14. Jump up to:a b Sharf 2000.
  15. ^ Harmless 2007, pp. 10–17.
  16. Jump up to:a b James & 1982 (1902), p. 30.
  17. ^ Harmless 2007, p. 14.
  18. ^ James & 1987-b, p. 1264.
  19. Jump up to:a b Bridgers 2005, p. 27.
  20. ^ Johnson 1964, p. 68.
  21. Jump up to:a b c d Bunge 2001, p. 341.
  22. ^ Merklinger 1993, p. 67.
  23. ^ Wentzel Van Huyssteen 2003, p. 569.
  24. Jump up to:a b Singer 2001.
  25. ^ Marshall, Paul (2005). Mystical Encounters with the Natural World: Experiences and Explanations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 126ISBN 9780199279432.
  26. ^ Laszlo, Ervin (2008). Quantum Shift in the Global Brain: How the New Scientific Reality Can Change Us and Our World. Rochester, Vermont: Inner Traditions. p. 123. ISBN 9781594772337.
  27. ^ Wilber, Ken (2006). Integral Spirituality. London: Integral Books. pp. 68–69.

Notes

  1. ^ The term "religious experience" has become synonymous with the terms "mystical experience", "spiritual experience", and "sacred experience".[12]

Bibliography

External links



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