ONE COSMOS UNDER GOD
The Unification of Matter, Life, Mind and
Spirit
by Robert W. Godwin
(Paragon House, 2004, paperback $19.95)
We can best make sense out of human history, according to
psychologist Robert W. Godwin, if we recognize it as
the chaos and turmoil resulting from our continuous reach toward
“vertical liftoff”—our evolutionary desire to
realize a consciousness that will take us beyond “mere
biological, Darwinian existence.” In his astonishing first
book, One Cosmos under God, Godwin offers a fine
example of such liftoff. It's a soaring tribute to the
intellectual and spiritual heights a human being can reach by
stretching to take in the whole fourteen-billion-year trajectory
of the cosmos. With creative exuberance and analytic precision,
Godwin tackles the most fundamental human questions and explores
them from an evolutionary perspective that leaves neo-Darwinism
almost literally in the dust. For Godwin, humanity did not arise
out of the random ricocheting of matter but in the upward pull
of everything toward a telos, toward pure spirit or Godhead
itself. In the august tradition of Teilhard de Chardin and Sri
Aurobindo, Godwin turns history on its head by arguing that
evolution cannot be explained by the march of prior events but
only through the recognition of an acausal dimension of life
that both precedes everything and awaits its full manifestation
in the future. And this perspective on creation and evolution
sheds new light on some of the most intractable puzzles of
existence.
One Cosmos begins and ends in
“re-Joyceful” word play, self-consciously imitating
James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Yet this is play with a
serious purpose, as Godwin puns with various and sundry terms
expressing humanity's love affair with the absolute, infinite,
and sacred to describe the birth of the cosmos and our merging
with it. Sandwiched in between his punning preface and
postscript are four books that explore each dramatic stage of
life's progression: Cosmogenesis, the creation of
matter; Biogenesis, the development of life;
Psychogenesis, the birth of thought; and finally
Cosmotheosis, the ultimate stage (“It's a
Onederful Life!” Godwin puns) that is yet to come. This
last stage entails “the transcendence of the local self
and union with the living God. . . . [A] blessedly mixed
marriage [that] is not an undifferentiated oneness, nor a static
twoness, but a dynamic twoness in Oneness experienced both
outwardly and inwardly, in an ecstatic union of finite and
Infinite.” Each of these distinct stages, Godwin reminds
us, was unforeseeable, unimaginable from what had come before.
He calls each, in its own way, a singularity: a point
at which the then-current reality became so saturated, so
charged, that a radical break happened with all that had gone
before and suddenly something new blasted into
existence.
For Godwin, this creative potential reveals a cosmic
intention toward consciousness, toward Self-knowing. Godwin
(“Your Man in Nirvana reporting from the serene of the
climb”) unfolds the purpose of human life from the top
down, from the radical endpoint of our sacred
“cosmobliteration” or Union with the Divine.
“Evidently,” he comments, “the universe is
filled with . . . 'empty' fields of pure logos awaiting a
nervous system sophisticated enough to evoke them. In other
words, [the nondual], which exists outside time and space, may
actually require a time-bound nervous system to manifest
locally.” This cosmic strange attractor that we call the
Divine exerts a constant pull upwards on the consciousness and
development of humanity.
From this top-down perspective, the conclusions that Godwin
draws make profound and unexpected sense. Conventionally, we
look at the historical development of life out of matter,
arguing that the universe is fundamentally dead and empty and
that life is some strange and random coincidence that emerged
from nonlife. This, in effect, elevates death—the absence
of all life—to the level of a foundational principle in
the universe itself. Which, Godwin asserts, it is not.
“All death is local,” he writes.
“Unlike Life, which must be a nonlocal, immanent spiritual
principle of the cosmos, there can be no metaphysical principle
called 'death.' Rather, there are only cadavers and corpses,
strictly local areas where Life is no longer concentrated and
outwardly visible at the moment.” Thus, life is the
central principle of the cosmos—and that has profound
implications regarding who we are and where we are going.
One Cosmos under God is one of those rare books that
consistently jolts us out of the decrepit beliefs that structure
our understanding of ourselves and the world. However, the
enormity of the task that Godwin is undertaking does mean that
some of his ideas are not fully and clearly presented. For
example, his provocative concept of “antievolutionary mind
parasites” (compulsive patterns in the human psyche) is
never adequately explained, and so, remains a tantalizing but
vague idea. Also, he offers a new symbolic lexicon to replace
oversaturated spiritual and religious terms that hold so many,
and often conflicting, connotations. He notes that the term
God has become “so overloaded with cultural,
historical, and idiosyncratic personal meanings that its use for
communication with others is extremely problematic.” (One
wishes that he would have considered this before adopting the
title One Cosmos under God.) His admirably
creative response—a new symbolic language to describe the
spiritual dimension—ends up lacking warmth, depth, and
richness because his abstract symbols are, in fact, meaningless.
(For example, in his lexicon he uses the symbol [o] to represent
the ego-identified self.)
But his fundamental point that the terms we use to describe
Spirit should be filled with experience rather than
beliefs or concepts is well taken. “Few of us have the
means or resources to carry out original research in physics,
biology, or neurology,” he says. “However, each of
us has the equivalent of our own particle accelerator [our own
mind and consciousness] with which to carry out the most
sophisticated psycho-spiritual research.” And the subtle
discrimination and wide vistas that he shares from his own quest
for deeper understanding show what is possible from the new
inner science that he points us toward. Deeply influenced by the
great Indian sage and consciousness explorer Sri Aurobindo,
Godwin has clearly engaged in his own spiritual atom-splitting
to have produced such a remarkable integration of science,
psychology, and spirit. One Cosmos under God is a
thrilling contribution to the emerging canon of evolutionary
thought—one that leaves us eager to embark on the next
journey with this daring cosmic dharmanaut.
Elizabeth Debold
SELLING SPIRITUALITY
The Silent Takeover of Religion
by Jeremy Carrette and Richard King
(Routledge, 2004, paperback $22.95)
Jeremy Carrette and Richard King, authors of Selling
Spirituality: The Silent Takeover of Religion, have
developed a theory that is both disturbing and sadly convincing.
According to these authors, today it is spirituality, not
religion that, as Karl Marx famously wrote in 1844, has become
“the opium of the people,” sedating and numbing us
to the state of the world and our own souls. As a matter of
fact, they argue, spirituality—that which we trust to be
the fountainhead of meaning, mystery, and value in
life—has undergone nothing short of a “corporate
takeover” and has become the latest victim of neoliberal
ideology, a modified form of liberalism that values free-market
capitalism above all else. “In our view,” Carrette
and King write, “this reflects a wider cultural
reorientation of life according to a set of values that
commodifies human experience and opens up the space for the
corporate takeover of all human knowledge and life.”
The confluence of economics and spirituality has produced
what the authors call “New Age capitalism,” a
“brand name for the meaning of life” that
reinterprets religious and spiritual truths to benefit the
profoundly individualistic and materialistic postmodern person.
According to Carrette and King, New Age capitalism's overriding
characteristic is the hawking of “personalised packages of
meaning . . . rather than offering recipes for social change and
identification with others.” And this popular form of
spirituality, lacking any shared definitions or the context of
tradition, is too easily co-opted by “the desiring machine
of consumerism.” The result is that instead of providing
effective paths for social transformation, spirituality is now
little more than a balm that soothes us, helping us to cope with
and perhaps feel a little better about the harsh realities and
existential hurdles of the modern world.
Throughout the book, Carrette and King explain in great
detail how the religious traditions and institutions that have
historically bound humans to one another in an ethical, moral,
and social contract have lost their relevancy and power. They
refer to this process as the “privatisation of
religion,” and they claim it occurred in two distinct
phases: first, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when
the Enlightenment relegated religion to the private sphere of
the individual; and second, in the 1960s when new forms of
religious experimentation, particularly with the Asian
traditions, exploded in popularity. This gave birth to an
extreme fascination with “peak experiences,”
resulting in what Carrette and King call “a peculiar
orientation and obsession with the individual self as the source
of authority.” Working in tandem, these two
developments—the void of established religions and an
unmoored spirituality rooted in personal
satisfaction—meant that capitalism, materialism, and
consumerism became the overwhelming forces of our individual
lives and our culture as a whole.
Both Carrette and King are British university professors in
religious studies, and each is well versed (you could almost say
entrenched) in postmodern theory and academia. Their research
interests traverse everything from early Advaita Vedanta and
Mahayana Buddhism to William James, the theology of economics,
and gender studies. What distinguishes them from other
postmodern theorists and makes Selling Spirituality a
unique and often brilliant social critique is that their
neo-Marxist look at modern spirituality is entirely nonsecular.
Indeed, the most important point of the book may be Carrette and
King's assertion that any movement opposed to the spread of
neoliberal ideology must transcend the “secular
boundaries of its own critique.” “Moreover,”
they write, “for the vast majority of the world's
population, a 'secular' ideology that de-sacrilises the world
far too easily ends up turning it into a commodity. This
suggests that avowed secular ideologies may be part of the
problem rather than the solution.”
At times, Carrette and King's own spiritual interests and
outright disgust for the narcissism of the day are passionately
displayed on the pages of the book. It's as if they
are—incredibly—transcending the secular, postmodern
academic genre while at the same time managing to invoke the
work of Foucault, Nietzsche, and Freud to extend the
“hermeneutics of suspicion” to spirituality.
Nevertheless, it is sometimes frustratingly difficult to
understand Carrette and King's prescriptions, few as there are.
Though both insist that the West cannot return to the traditions
of the past, they also hint that engaging with the world's
religions may be our only effective response to neoliberalism's
“de-sacrilisation” of life. Only once in the book do
they explicitly state what they mean in this regard, citing
Mexico's Catholic Zapatistas' Third-World liberation theologies,
the Chipko movement of the Himalayas, Thich Naht Hanh's Socially
Engaged Buddhism, and the Swadhyaya movement in Western India as
examples of movements that successfully draw upon traditional
religions while responding to the destructive effects of
globalization. But without a thorough discussion of how these
movements could be pragmatic models outside their indigenous
countries, effective for those of us in the West actually
saturated in “capitalist spirituality” and the
capitalist system, the idea that these are the types of models
we so badly need, either socially or spiritually, remains
unconvincing.
At times complex and demanding, it would be unfair to
recommend Selling Spirituality as a good beach read.
Nor does it offer a substantial vision of authentic future forms
of spirituality. Nevertheless, nothing could be more important
than understanding the true extent to which spirituality has
been co-opted by the forces of materialism and our insatiable
hunger for spiritual palliatives rather than real solutions.
Selling Spirituality will show you how this has
happened and what the cost may be with a satisfying and rare
sophistication. As Carrette and King tell us, “the most
troubling aspect of many modern spiritualities is precisely that
they are not troubling enough.”
Maura R. O'Connor