THE HUMAN AGE
By David Spangler
Lorian Association
November, 2009 - #30

Original Link

Almost twenty years ago, I started teaching workshops and classes on finding and tapping one’s deepest spirit. These programs were meant to be both inspirational and practical, giving tools for finding one’s inner sources of creativity. They were precursors to the more advanced and sophisticated work I eventually developed through Incarnational Spirituality. For the most part they were successful in achieving their ends, and people felt empowered by them. But in nearly every class, there was at least one person and sometimes more who had difficulty with one of the key exercises.

In this particular exercise, I asked the participants to tune into their humanity. We are, after all, human beings, not trees or dolphins, and our spiritual core cannot be divorced from our humanity. But for some people, this proved challenging as they felt ashamed to be human. For some this was due to religious training in their childhood that taught them that the body and human nature were “fallen” and shameful things, while for others it was because of their horror at what human activity was doing to the environment. Whatever the reason, being able to honor and love their intrinsic humanity was a stumbling block. I was not always able to help them move past this, but when I did, it was because together we were able to redefine and reimagine what it meant to be a human being and to appreciate the sacredness that lived in humanity as much as in any other part of the world.

What does it mean to be human? This question has been at the heart of much of my work over the past fifty years. For me, this is really three questions. The first is what does it mean individually, that is, what are the inherent capacities that you and I have by virtue of being the kind of creature we are? What are we capable of as persons? This was the primary question I explored in these workshops.

The second question is what does it mean to be human in relationship to the Sacred and to the non-physical or transpersonal realms? The third is what does it mean to be human in relationship to the world, by which I mean other humans, society, the environment, nature, and the planet as a whole?

If you are familiar with Incarnational Spirituality, these three will be familiar as the three-fold architecture for the incarnational process: Personal, Transpersonal, and World (though in fact, I usually divide the latter into humanity and nature giving a four-fold pattern). An incarnation is the interaction between these three elements creating through their blending the unique identity and life that each of us experiences.

As I have written at other times, one of the stimuli for investigating (at least from a spiritual point of view) the nature and process of incarnation over many years now was a statement from a non-physical colleague who said, “The problem with humanity is not that you’re too incarnated; it’s that you’re not incarnated enough.” This could just as easily be restated to say that our problem is not that we’re too human, it’s that we’re not human enough. In short, in each of these three fields we’re not being all that we could be -- and not doing all that we could do.

Here is the problem. Not only are we not exploring optimal expression within each of these three spheres of activity, in our modern culture we have separated them and have consequently lost sight of the wholeness that exists between them. We’ve turned the Transpersonal and Spiritual sphere either into a fantasy with no reality in a materialistic world or we’ve confined it within narrow religious dogmas. We’re reduced the World sphere into being simply a resource pool to feed our insatiable needs for energy and raw materials and a backdrop for the dramas of humanity. In so doing, we have elevated the Personal dimension over the other two in ways that have brought us to ecological, economic, and social disaster. To make matters worse, we have so narrowly defined what it means to be a person and what we’re each individually capable of that we’ve robbed even that dimension of its wholeness and full potential for engaging and integrating with the other two. (For an exhilarating exploration of what some of this potential may be, I recommend Michael Murphy’s book The Future of the Body.)

But what if this changed? What if we set about to reclaim our full humanity by finding coherency and wholeness in the relationship of all three of these spheres?

How might we start with such a process?

As I suggested to participants in my long-ago workshops, we can begin by reimagining what it means to be human. We know all too well what separates us from the world. We have built powerful images about ourselves that tell us how we are different from all other species, how we are special, and how we are at the top of an evolutionary tree. What are less prominent in modern culture are images that tell us how we are part of the world, part of the community of life. So this is one place to begin. We need to discover the Gaian dimension of our humanity. We need to understand what in our nature connects us to the world. At heart, it is our capacity to love.

The French Jesuit scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin famously wrote, “The day will come when, after harnessing space, the winds, the tides, and gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, we shall have discovered fire.” This is very inspirational, but he went on to write, "Love is the affinity which links and draws together the elements of the world... Love, in fact, is the agent of universal synthesis. … Love alone can unite living beings so as to complete and fulfill them... for it alone joins them by what is deepest in themselves.”

Bringing love to the world is a human capability. It is more than just liking and appreciating nature the way we might fondly love a pet. It’s the self-sharing, self-giving love that we have with a beloved in which we surrender part of ourselves to let a larger wholeness emerge. It is the love that sees the other as an equal, a partner, a collaborator.

This deep kind of loving is something we can and must bring to the world because of who we are both as members of the planetary community and as a species that can love and can do so on a global level. This is something our technology cannot do for us. Only we can do it, drawing on our human spirit in the process. How might we do this? Teilhard went on to say, “All we need is to imagine our ability to love developing until it embraces the totality of men and the earth."

Imagine our ability.

Now we touch on a truly powerful human capacity: our imagination. Engraved on the lintel above the entranceway to my daughter’s school is a quote from Albert Einstein: Imagination is more important than knowledge. This is from the man who more than any other in our culture is the paradigm of the scientist, the man of knowledge.

But Einstein wasn’t saying that fantasy is more important that facts or that daydreams are more important than reality. He wasn’t denigrating knowledge but suggesting its limits. His full quote went on to say, “For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.”

In other words, imagination is the seed from which knowledge comes.

This is a precious seed. If we are to become planetary lovers, planetary partners, it will begin in our imaginations. We need to be able to imagine this possibility, see ourselves in this role, and have an image in our minds and hearts of our ability to do this. It’s out of such imagination that we will gain the knowledge of how to do it. It is from this imagining that we will gain new knowledge about ourselves.

Imagination is a core human ability. Our civilization -- all that we see around us -- comes from dreams that we have had, images we have held and striven to fulfill. Everything that we think of as “human” begins in our imaginations, including our images of ourselves. If we want to dream a different world, a better, more holistic, more caring world, then this is where it begins, just as the world we’re in began in the imaginations of our ancestors.

Last month’s David’s Desk described Peak Oil and some of the scenarios of civilizational collapse that stem from this environmental predicament. Often when I speak of this with others, the most common response is that technology will solve the problem. This may or may not be so -- my feeling is that we place way too much faith in technology as if it were a magic genii -- but what lies behind this response is something deeper which I do feel is appropriate. This is a faith in human imagination. It isn’t technology that will save us but our capacity to imagine, to see ourselves and the world in new and different ways and to think outside the box. Nor do I mean by this just technological or scientific imagination, powerful as that may be. I mean our social imagination, our political and economic imagination, and our spiritual imagination. (In many ways, this is what Incarnational Spirituality is, a new way of imagining ourselves and our relationship to the other two spheres of activity I mentioned above.)

It may well be that there is no way that technology on its own can “fix” the ecological and planetary predicament that we’ve created for ourselves, but this doesn’t mean we can’t imagine forms of society, politics, economics, spirituality, and just ordinary human living that adapt to changing conditions and create a world well worth living in both for ourselves and the other lives that share the planet with us. And if we do, it will undoubtedly arise from the fact that we have reimagined ourselves and our role in the world.

In fact, it is through imagination that we can learn to reconnect with the other spheres of incarnational activity, bringing the Personal, the Transpersonal, and the Planetary together in coherency. At the moment, particularly in our culture, we live in a restricted imagination of who we are and what is possible. To expand beyond these images into new collaborative connections with spirit and the world, we must open and expand our imaginations. We must think not only that this is possible, but that it’s possible specifically for us, for you and for me as individuals.

In 1995 the Nobel Prize winner for chemistry was Paul Crutzen who won his award for his research into ozone depletion. In 2000, he wrote a paper in which he said, “Considering [the] many other major and still growing impacts of human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales, it seems to us more than appropriate to emphasize the central role of mankind in geology and ecology by proposing to use the term 'anthropocene' for the current geological epoch.” In short, we are now living in an age shaped and determined by humanity at a planetary scale: a Human Age.

For many, the implications of such human dominance are not good, though if the Peak Oil scenarios come to pass, this may be a very short “Age” indeed, though its consequences will be more long lasting as just the atmospheric changes alone will not be quickly or easily undone and the extinction of thousands of animal and plant species as a result of recent human activity will never be undone.

Deciding whether or not we are in a “Human Age” is not an option. The impact that humanity is having is beyond question. We are reshaping the earth. The anthropocene epoch is upon us. But what if through love and imagination and the new knowledge that can come from both, humanity shifts away from dominance to being a steward of the planet or even better from my perspective, a partner? Perhaps then the idea of a Human Age might mean a blessing rather than a curse, a promise for our future and not simply a prediction of doom. Perhaps then no one will feel ashamed but will find new meaning and new potentials in what it means to be human.

Is this possible? I believe so, but let me let Teilhard have the last word this month, giving a definition of humanity with which I fully concur. He wrote, “Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our ability did not exist. We are collaborators in creation."

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WHO IS DAVID SPANGLER?

http://www.lorian.org/davidspage.html

David's Desk is my opportunity to share thoughts and tools for the spiritual journey. These letters David's personal insights and opinions and do not necessarily reflect the sentiments or thoughts of any other person in Lorian or of Lorian as a whole. If you wish to share this letter with others, please feel free to do so; however the material is ©2009 by David Spangler.

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