Theology and Humanism as Self-Realization

Friday, November 03, 2006

What should be the emphasis of our effort and study in Life?  Self? Nature? Cosmology?  Divinity? Perhaps even all of these together are the totality important for people to come to know to have meaning in life. This is the way that theology is combined with humanism as self-realization.

  But how do we come to know anything at all? We are born into a world pregnant from the past.   We are its offspring, and we take our inheritance from the past, both the true and the false together and make our way in life.  We are not great thinkers. Even worse, our feelings are for the most part mere reactions to our mechanized way of thinking, which identifies always with everything. We look at everything see and understand in relationship to a self-concept that defines us, which is completely automatic or mechanized intelligence.

Still, this is how we are, in every moment of our lives, and so we must start here, with ourselves exactly as we are.   Two millennia of culture based on Judeo-Christian theology has led us to a place where many people have beliefs about God, but do not know anything about themselves.  In our current time, with the newer influences of the modern world, Mankind has lost touch with its humanity, despite the inheritance of the past. Perhaps, it was lacking all along in the traditions, and the modernity was simply built on its faulty foundations.

Humanism is an idealized set of beliefs, just like theology is. It differs in its content.   To know one's humanity is to know the world and our place in it.  Theology starts with the idea of  Divinity, or as the Ancients called it more precisely "First Cause" and then made attributions of qualities based on the appearances of the chains of causality that caused the world to exist. Man of course emerges from this creation process.  Humanism looks at the result, and in particular what is manifested today in the phenomena of Man, and makes retrospective attributions toward the causes that have formed us.

This pair of opposite views, that of Theology and Humanism, maybe once in the past were together called Philosophy. Its adherents, the "Lovers of Wisdom" sought to understand all things and married the study of the human with the study of the divine.   It's a long-standing matter of history that Theology in the form of religion dominated human affairs. Even today in the world, we see the struggle between theology and secularism. Secularism is humanism defined without an emphasis on what is human.  In effect, it is a degeneration of the ideal of Humanism that looks at man and his potential and possibilities as the object of knowledge.

 Just as the Renaissance began the process of rediscovery of the ancients, though seen through the theology of its time, Our post-post-modern era of the emerging 21st century is seeing the rediscovery of ancient knowledge, but in the developed world it is seeing it through the eyes of secularism.  All the struggles in the world today, though superficially about energy and power and resources at their depth are really about the conflicting inheritances of world cultures from the past, and this is most deeply expressed as the struggle between Divinity-based religions, and Humanist-based philosophy.  The very future of the world hangs in the balance.

The secular world needs to rediscover humanism as the source of its ethics and values.   In this lies the answer to the spiritual needs of the modern world, which uses science to understand nature, and which needs a context to understand our existence that is not based on attributions to divinity. By contrast, theology relies upon faith and belief that in most cases can neither be proved nor refuted by the method of science.

No, modern man in the 21st century must begin to understand "First Cause" by first understanding what it means to be a human being.   We need to look at how we should act concerning the world in which we live. We need to understand what makes human societies work and what helps people develop their individual and ultimately, collective potentials.  We need to live as a fulfillment of our place in the natural world as fully developed human beings. The "First Cause" of humanism, will arise by recognizing what in our nature makes us human.

 To do so we must begin with an understanding of ourselves. To understand that we experience our life through our thinking, feeling, and sensation, and how we derive meaning from that experience.  In this study, we are not alone because it is a study that has been going on since at least the time of Pythagoras, and has continued through the modern era of existential philosophy.  

 The method is inquiry & self-reflection.  The tools are our ability to observe our states of being and to remember our existence as we reflect on our personal history. The outcome is a different set of conversations that reveal the results of a living search and not an interpretation of meaning based solely on inherited beliefs.

 It seems this process, which was called by Gurdjieff Self-Remembering, is beginning to take root in small ways in our world. For those of us following this line of development, though we may not see our role in the big picture of an emerging humanist paradigm, we nonetheless are playing it. If we can launch a new world of understanding that will enable people to come to possess the kind of presence that would be possible for people, then we can all understand that we live in a place between what is truly human and what is truly divine.

 Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash

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