“If doctors today were operating with third century technology they would still be performing surgery with sharp sticks.” NDW
Ken Wilber is an American writer and psychologist who teaches the difference between growing up and waking up. All humans grow up - from infancy to old age - in virtually the same way, but Wilber maintains that waking up is not aligned in any clear way with our growth stages. Waking up, he says, means developing awareness in successive stages that encompass and transcend each stage that went before. Like babies who move from oneness with mother to feelings of self and then awareness of the outside world, humanity passes through stages he labels Archaic, Magic, Mythic, Rational and Integral. They indicate passage from “nothing” to “me” to “us” to “all of us”. Thus, each generation evolves through stages that always move forward.
We welcome discoveries in our understanding of chemistry, biology and astronomy. Advances in science, education, medicine and law are greeted with great acclaim as developments of an ever more functional mankind. But there is one aspect of human nature that doesn’t appear to move forward - a fundamental belief that seems to remain in a state of arrested development.
At the dawn of the 21st century nearly a third of the world’s population still maintains the belief in a God who lives apart from us somewhere in the sky, who required the death of his son as appeasement for our sinfulness, yet still requires our obedience in order to avoid eternal punishment in hellfire. This dire consequence may not be preached as often in today’s church (to stop the pews from emptying) but it is still a core belief of the Christian doctrine. Deep-seated notions of sin, judgment and punishment born in a mythic stage of development and held onto today are not allowing healthy spiritual growth.
Our scientific knowledge grows as we mature. Why doesn’t the Church pursue spiritual advancement the same way? Maybe because the Church says the Word of God is the same yesterday, today and forever. If it’s new, it’s not true.
Worse, the insistence of some that their religion is the only way to God further increases our anxiety. Any who follow God a different way must suffer the consequences. And so, unsure of our worthiness to God we spend our lives trying to prove it to ourselves - and to each other. This need for validation only deepens our inborn egocentricity and leads to competition, disagreement and hostilities that threaten the world we live in. Wars are still being fought over whose god is the right god.
Humanity’s ancient cultural story about an angry God demanding obedience from his creation may have been a necessary part of an early stage of development, but is no longer meaningful today. In fact it is the chief reason for the rejection, by millions, of the idea of any sort of god at all - a fatal illustration of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. It is time for us now to remove these ancient ideas from our current story. A more rational understanding of the spirit of God in man, the next stage in our development if we allow it, would eliminate selfish, hurtful and malicious behavior from the human experience. I sometimes get discouraged that it isn’t happening faster. But it will.
Max Planck was a German physicist who said that new ideas like this don't triumph by making their opponents see the light, but rather because their opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is more familiar with them. Young people today are choosing to forego the religious beliefs of their parents, and consider themselves spiritual but not religious. This is a good sign.
Humanity appears to be waking up and ready to move from a Mythical into a more Rational stage of development.
