1882 was the year that Friedrich
Nietzsche announced that God was dead and added that “we” had killed him. At Cambridge in England during the same
year, Frederic Myers with several colleagues officially launched a new
scientific discipline called psychical research. If ever there was a “meaningful” historical
coincidence, this one qualifies.
It is about the most important
crisis in the history of Western consciousness. A key item of the Western worldview was the belief in God,
but now we have the son of a Protestant minister announcing the death of
God. Modern astronomy and
evolutionary biology reduce the Biblical God-story to fiction. But the same year a discipline took shape in England that
attempted to use scientific method to investigate the nature of the human soul—or, as we might say
today, the nature and scope of human consciousness.
In Nietzsche’s pronouncement, it
is “we” who have killed God. What
does that mean? Anyone acquainted with history knows. The men who created modern science, new physics, astronomy,
geology, Darwin’s idea of natural selection—it all contradicts the creationist
picture of the world as portrayed in the Bible. The more we learned about the natural
world, the more in effect we “killed” the mainline, Bible-based conception of a
personal God.
This worldview crash was bound to
destabilize the collective psyche, disrupting the traditional archetypes,
prompting revolutions on all fronts of culture and society. For if there is no
God, then all things are possible, as Dostoyevsky said. For Nietzsche, the
death of God meant the birth of the Ubermensch—the
Overman (but let’s not forget Wonder Woman). In fact, a number of German thinkers were good at this kind
of God-killing. The philosopher
Ludwig Feuerbach “killed” God the way the Tibetan Buddhists do, by recognizing
the gods as our psychic projections. Marx “killed God” by exposing the
political and economic underpinnings of religion.
And yet, all this seems to suggest
that God may not be dead after all, especially since Nietzsche and Feuerbach were
both ready to hail the godlike potential of humanity. So what we call God may not be dead but driven into humanity’s
psychic underground.
For sure, this “God” lurking in the black hole of
the psyche does break out from time to time, and in all sorts of ways—too
often twisted and nightmarishly
malign, it must be said.
Myers, describes in A Fragment, his biography (assembled by
his wife, Eveleen), how he fell into a metaphysical funk once he realized that
his biblical faith had been damaged beyond repair. Myers picked himself up and, with Henry Sidgwick, a famously
scrupulous moral philosopher, resolved to use science to investigate the outer
limits of the human personality. Can
we identify a transcendent factor at work in human experience? This was the
question. Does an angel of the impossible haunt the corridors of nature? If so, it may be possible to explore
the question of immortality, or at least of survival and continuity. So in 1882
they founded the Society for Psychical
Research (SPR).
The aim of this Society was not
to attempt to salvage belief in the old catechism God, so to speak. Rather, it was to investigate
experiences that might imply the survival of consciousness after death. The English Society gave birth to
French, Italian, German, Polish, Russian, and American (think William James)
societies and independent researchers.
The idea gained traction that the same scientific attitude that began by
destroying pre-scientific mythologies could be used to create new science-based
mythologies of transcendence.
The ongoing evolution of science
is still in a very early part of its possible future. The strange thing is that quantum physics has led to a
crisis in our concept of reality, a crisis in which physical reality seems to vanish
into a quantum cloud of uncertainty, which, to be restored to reality, depends
on our mental activity.
The psychical researches that
began in 1882 are still afoot, and the overall knowledge of phenomena related
to postmortem consciousness is impressive. No doubt something is going on with all those near-death
experiences, ghostly apparitions, mediumistic performances, out-of-body trips,
lucid dreams, crisis visions, and mystical transports.
So, saved and revised by science,
the part about souls, consciousness and after death—but what about the reported
mortal blow to the God question? Modern science destroys the creation story,
but was also the spur to explore the undiscovered country of the human
mind. What has emerged is a
picture of human mental life that is vast, multilayered, and infinitely
complex.
The enormous expansion of the
concept of mind—Larry Dossey spoke of nonlocal mind and
consciousness—helps us imagine more clearly how the belief in gods and goddesses,
demons and daimons, jinns and angels, and the like, might have come about. All this remains a task for the
parapsychology of religion.
The expansion includes the idea
of one great mind; of Myers’ and James’s “subliminal” or “hidden” self,
respectively. This expanded
concept of mind helps us understand the Upanishads and many of the world’s
great mystical traditions from a fresh, empirically grounded perspective.
In other words, the notion of “God”
may be thought of as originating in some transcendent experience. It is part of human capacity to have such experiences. Only later do they sometimes crystallize
into mythical personalities and then through time and politics harden into rigid
dogmas, around which exclusive
identities are formed.
1882 is the year of a coincidence
that marks a turning-point in the history of consciousness: the critical point
where Western beliefs about meaning, spirituality, and transcendence enter a
crisis of near-death. It has set
into motion a transformation still in progress, a story whose ending remains unresolved
and undecided.
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6 comments:
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I agree with the first comment. Im believing that we should back our intuition and the unseen. Reflect on our dreams and coincidences-approach life playfully. And hopefully a universal consciousness will help heal the negativities that exist in humanity.Magically evolve into a pure essence.
Natural selection, the Big Bang, God as projections from our own psyche, the economic underpinnings of religion, each destabilized Biblical myths. In times of destabilization humans look outward toward the mystical. As the old idea of God was dying, a new curiosity developed--the potential "super powers" of the human mind.
Cultural coincidences provide objective evidence for the occurrence and usefulness of coincidences and encourage us to seek explanations. Statistics is not enough. What forces made for this exquisite timing?
Well written, thought provoking and timely, Professor Grosso!
Thanks for your comment, Dr. Beitman,and I'd like to recommend your book to readers, Connecting With Coincidence, which explores a whole range of topics about which meaningful coincidences cluster such as love, money, death, etc. Your book is an original study of how coincidences seem to be the secret language in which the universe often seems to be revealing its secrets to us.
The comment "God is dead" certainly captured the attention of the listeners, but it would have been much more accurately stated as "Man's primitive concept of God", arising through our attempted literal reading of poetic, metaphorical scriptures, is dead", and a new vision of God founded on reason and enlightened experience must be found. It is now being found, and the appearance of God will continue to grow more consistent with the truths found in science, as both spirituality and science, in the quest for Truth, find themselves approaching singularity.
Excellent comment, Rip Parker, and I agree. I think in fact we may be evolving toward, as you write,"a new vision of God founded on reason and enlightened experience". As I said, psychical research is one of the key elements involved in this possible evolution.
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