Adelphiasophism
Matthew Fox, Rupert Sheldrake and Creation Spirituality
Abstract
© 1998 The Adelphiasophists and AskWhy! Publications. Freely distribute as long as it is unaltered and properly attributed
Contents Updated: Sunday, June 20, 1999
There are elements in common between Adelphiasophism and Creation Spirituality, but ultimately Matthew Fox seeks to accommodate Christianity to Nature Spirituality, whereas Adelphiasophism believes the earth will not be saved while human beings think an illusion is more important than Nature.
Matthew Fox and Creation Spirituality
Without the Goddess, we’re cut off from both the full power of motherhood and the power of creativity in the larger sense—because all of us have the capacity to birth something.
Matthew Fox’s radical stance within the Roman Catholic Church led to his expulsion from the priesthood in 1993.
I stirred up ancient repressed material in the Vatican’s collective psyche about fear of the body and eros, which they’ve historically projected onto women, witches, and native peoples.
Undaunted, Fox founded the University of Creation Spirituality (UCS) in Oakland, California, in January 1996 and opened its doors in September 1996, to answer the warning:
We must change our ways of living on the planet drastically in the next few years. If we do not, the planet as we know it will not survive our human folly.
The very word Sabbath, says Fox, meant that God spent the day delighting in creation. We must recover that sense of delight in creation. The path of delight leads to creativity, and, of course, diversity. And diversity is the cornerstone of life.
Creation Spirituality is about bringing science, mysticism and art together to allow the spirit to flow and humans to recover their deep and spiritual selves. We should celebrate our imperfections by realizing that we are all imperfect, and in that revelation, in our very diversity, lies the beauty of life. Imperfection is not a sin, it’s “what keeps things humming.” Rather than dwelling on repenting and transcending our imperfections, we should focus on the magic of our creation, of all creation. The school’s intention, says Fox, is “to bring out the artist, mystic, and prophet in every student.”
Honouring creation as original blessing, Creation Spirituality integrates the wisdom of Western spirituality and the global indigenous cultures with the emerging scientific understanding of the universe and the passion for creativity. Creation Spirituality is present in the earliest tradition of the Hebrew Bible and was celebrated by the mystics of medieval Europe.
On the individual level, Creation Spirituality recognizes the artist, mystic, and prophet in each person by honoring the experiences of awe, amazement, and gratitude; suffering, silence, and mystery; imagination, creativity, and renewal; and justice-making, compassion, and celebration. On the community level, Creation Spirituality provides a solid foundation and holistic perspective from which to address the critical issues of our times, including the revitalization of education of education, religion, work and culture; honoring of women’s wisdom; the restoration and celebration of hope in today’s youth; and the promotion of social and ecological justice.
On a cosmological level, Creation Spirituality celebrates the universe story and our active participation in that story, thought art, education, and ritual. Art-as-meditation is the primary form of prayer in the creation-centered tradition. Ritual itself is a practice of art-as-meditation.
The art forms may include any of the following: painting, improvisation, arts as healing, clay, writing, walking in nature, drumming, singing, Eastern chants, massage, dancing and more. No matter which of these practices a person chooses to take there is a common experience to them all.
They are all experiences of prayer, and no one way is “Roman Catholic” or “Protestant” or “Buddhist.” Art is deeply ecumenical—that is, universal. No church can lay claim to owning art as process.
Art is not only the most appropriate language for expressing mystical experience; it can also be the process that elicits the experience of mysticism in the first place. When art is entered into as process and not as product, art becomes a “Way,” a path to the Spirit.
The question that arises about the Spirit is not so much where is the Spirit—for the Spirit is everywhere. A more pressing question is how do we make an inner journey into the Spirit. We believe that the most accessible route to the Spirit, the least elitist and the most available route, the deepest and most authentic route, is that of art-as-meditation. Through art-as-meditation, we come in touch with our own experiences of depth—our experiences of joy and our experiences of suffering.
But we do not stop there—rather, by accessing the depths of the experience we also access the means out of the depths of awe and grief into the light of day, namely creativity. By journeying into our experience by way of art-as-meditation we come in touch with our images once again and our power for imagery: this is empowering. It gives us our souls back, and our responsibility to express them. In the process, the Spirit returns—through our imaginations and through our hands, bodies, voices, songs, color, clay, words of poetic truth.
Despite his conflict with the Catholic Church, Fox, who joined the Episcopal denomination in 1994, continues to uphold the Christian tradition.
Christianity is a powerful force that cannot be ignored; otherwise you turn it over to the fundamentalists, the patriarchy… It’s a religion that needs a lot of healing and a lot of waking up—to the lost Feminine side of God, to its fear of sensuality, to its anti- Semitism, and to its own lost mystical tradition.
UCS is modelled on the European cathedral schools established during the Goddess revival in the Middle Ages. When universities were invented in the West in the 12th century their real purpose was to be a place where persons could find their place in the universe. Cosmology and the new story of creation that science is giving us arouses the experience of awe, wonder and reverence. UCS brings the feminine back into academia by integrating both rational and intuitive modes of inquiry.
Among the principles of the school are the following:
- Small is beautiful no bigger than 100 master students full time
- Faculty who do spiritual practice and have an inner life
- Community among faculty and students
- Conscious awareness at a philosophical and structural level of the move from a modern to a postmodern world
- Honoring the earth-based spiritual traditions
- Applying the principles of creation spirituality to work and everyday living
- Nourishing and supporting the mystic in each person.
- Teaching of spiritual praxis, especially art as meditation
- Intellectual rigor, service and compassion: All knowledge is meant to serve the larger community
- A school committed to bringing inner and outer work together
- A coming together of science, mysticism and art to bring about cultural transformation
- A place where the artist will find space to develop his or her gifts in the context of serving the larger community
- A ritual laboratory where we will create and celebrate ancient rituals as well as devise new ones.
A spiritual awakening is necessary today—and a clear commitment to getting ourselves out of a consciousness that is anti-mystical and is destroying the grace and beauty of our planet. A spiritual awakening must permeate our educational institutions which have fallen into much cynicism and bureaucratisation and dullness of spirit.
Mysticism
Mysticism is the capacity to induce the feeling of the spiritual, the feeling of overwhelming awe, beauty and mystery of Nature. As Matthew Fox says:
Any search for beauty in life is in some sense a mystical search.
Mysticism is often a talent, and some experts claim it cannot be taught—it is innate or absent. Yet that implies that people cannot be taught to see beauty. Obviously some people appreciate the beautiful instinctively, but some people are “Philistines”. But, given the desire, even Philistines can be taught to appreciate beauty.
The spiritual is similar. The problem with it as it has come to us through Christianity is that people think that spirituality is something mysterious and given only to a few people specially chosen by God. That means that when they gape speechless at the sunlight glimpsing through the restless leaves into a wooded glade, they do not realise that they have experienced the mystical. They expect to see bright lights and psychedelia and so do not recognize the wonder of what they have seen!
William James saw that some people had a psychological constitution more suited to experiencing the mystical but he also saw that “mystical faculties” could be encouraged. Presumably Fox thinks the same because he has set up a university to encourage the appreciation of the Natural. The psychedelic illusions one gets from tripping might be a great stimulus to people who have had a jaded spiritual ability, but such experiences cannot match those that are had simply by suddenly seeing the wonder of Nature revealed unexpectedly as if you could hug the world.
Soul-Seeking
Two old Christian lags, Rupert Sheldrake and Matthew Fox, exchange tips for conning the new generation of people—aware of the dangers to the Natural world—into thinking that Christian spirituality is compatible with Nature sprituality, in “Natural Grace: Dialogues on Science and Spirituality” published by Bloomsbury. An extract appeared in “Resurgence.”
Rupert Sheldrake, apparently driven by a desire to prove Christian dogma to be correct, wants to believe some very old and faulty ideas. He seems to want to believe the soul is the immaterial thing within a living creature that makes it alive. When it departs the creature dies. The Greek word for soul is “psyche” and now it pertains to the personality.
That is quite proper because no Christian is concerned about anything as abstract as a soul. When they speak about the soul surviving death they mean their personality. They are not concerned about losing their body as long as that thing they consider to be themselves, their psyche, their personality, their soul, can live on somehow. By making the soul the essence of life, they define it as everlasting. Thus no one concerned about dying need worry. Souls are the life principle and though the body dies when the soul withdraws, the soul, the personality lives on. QED.
Now Sheldrake, though a religious man, is supposed to be a scientist and tries, or gives the impression of trying, to follow scientific methodology. The soul has supposed to have left the dead body but immediately on death, nothing else seems different. The mass and substance of the body seems the same, it is simply that it now does not function. It is dead. Sheldrake wants to conclude that something has left the body but concedes that there is no evidence of anything so doing. What has left must therefore be “essentially immaterial.”
Most of us would say, “Fine—what has left the body is life. Life is not something you can weigh. It is like love, an abstract concept, so has no measurable mass or substance. It is a state.” That though is not sufficient for supernaturalists. Sheldrake has to have an immaterial life force called the soul so that he can return to the idea of an after-life.
So, what other evidence for the soul can he find? Aristotle thought the soul was a formative principle, some magical property that makes things become what they become. Why does an acorn become an oak tree? Because of its soul. Calling this principle the soul, though is just causing confusion. How did Aristotle, or how does Sheldrake know it is the same thing as the immaterial ghostly thing that leaves the body at death? Sheldrake’s answer is that it isn’t. Human beings have three souls. Well, that is to say, they have one soul which does three separate things. There is this formative soul, an animal soul and an intellectual or rational soul, which is our consciousness. Consciousness also links us to the rest of nature.
Sheldrake takes all of this to be true, though he is supposedly a scientist, and though he tells us in his books to do certain experiments, he seems not to have done any himself to prove all of this fancy. It seems that, because the Church put its trust in Aristotle, so should everyone else.
All of this sound Christian belief was spoiled by Rene Descartes who showed that Nature could be explained without the need for souls. The heart was not where the soul lived it was a pump for the blood—unromantic and unsupernatural, but a hypothesis that works extremely well in practice.
Sheldrake tells us that how the rational soul interacted with the machinery of the body was an utter mystery to Descartes and is still a mystery today. This is one of those mysteries that are easily solved but people like Sheldrake don’t want to solve them—it would stop them from being mysteries.
The interaction of the soul and the body is a deep mystery because the soul is a deep mystery, not because the body is a deep mystery. The soul is a deep mystery because it is an outmoded theory that science has discarded but Christianity cannot because it is at the centre of its system of lies. There is no mystery at all about how the soul interacts with the body, if there is no soul!
If, on the other hand, Sheldrake is trying to confuse his poor confused acolytes even more by pretending that the soul now is a word for consciousness, he is approaching the problem wrongly. The question then is, “How does the material brain give rise to consciousness?” It is an important question that scientists and philosophers are working on, but has nothing to do with the supernatural.
Sheldrake then tells us that the “mind/body problem” (no mention of soul, though he wants us to infer that, by mind, he means soul) is so intractable for scientists that they ignore it. Of course, it is intractable, and most scientists “do” ignore it, but the reason is not the laziness, neglect or apathy that he implies but simply that it is a long way removed from the central concerns of most scientists. The same laziness, apathy and neglect is the reason why most people do not know how their TV, or their car works, even quite a lot of scientists. It simply is not their field of concern, it is someone else’s—leave them to it.
Sheldrake explains that the ancient idea was that all things had a soul. A magnet for example, had a soul very much akin to the human soul. Heat up the magnet or batter it about a lot and it will die. It loses its ability to attract and repel other magnets. “The basis of magnetism and electricity was a psychic reality, a psychic entity”—its soul!
Why Sheldrake should want to mention this in his arguments is quite hard to understand because it is an excellent example that the soul is not some animating or supernatural principle. The physics of magnets is well understood, magnetism can be explained with mathematical precision and none of it needs the postulation of any “soul.” The fact that human consiousness has not yet been explained is scarcely a reason why a supernatural entity should be postulated there. Sheldrake is effectively using the old “God of the Gaps” rationalization of religious belief.
Well, perhaps, but he also has his other old fallback—the method of redefinition. Catching on to the magnet as working its power at a distance, he decides that he can redefine the soul as a physical field, like a magnetic field or a gravitational field. Wasn’t the formative principle a soul and that is a field—a morphogenetic field—that which determines the form of a seed. He concludes that souls have been brought back into science in the guise of fields. Sheldrake wants his morphic fields to be the soul, and control the working of the rational mind.
The trouble is that despite his huge popularity as a pseudo-science author, involving millions in his seven experiments, the evidence from them would not fill a Eucharist chalice and certainly would not convince the average scientist. Still, it sounds learned to the gullible and, as ever in Christian apologetics, that is all that matters.
Matthew Fox offers a sycophant’s reply to Sheldrake’s contribution on fields, which he considers “profound”. Fox is the former Dominican who wants to bring Nature spirituality into Christianity, an attempt to mix oil and water. “To me the soul is our passions. It’s what we love. As Jesus said, it’s where your treasure is. Our treasures are in the fields…” He goes on with this maniacal association of ideas for a while. Fox is fond of gibberish like this. His point seems to be that, yes, everything in Nature has soul. The cause of our troubles in the world are the absence or withered state of human souls.
Christians, indeed the religious in general, talk glibly about the soul, using a large number of different definitions of what it is, yet apparently still understanding each other perfectly. They are not actually communicating. Christian talk of souls and spirituality is phatic communion, as Malinowski termed it. It is like a sorority badge. It simply says, “we are in the same gang” and doesn’t have to mean anything. If you begin to think you can understand it, seek psychiatric help quickly before you finish up smug and superior, convinced that your own soul is going to a balmy place, or cringing, guilty and fearful, convinced it is heading for a sauna bath without the water.
Now hear this: “The soul is not in the body but the body is in the soul. “ Fox is changing the soul again. He means to identify the soul now with Nature itself. There might be nothing wrong with this except the puzzle that these people want to call everything “the soul.” He also wants it to be our consciousness of emotions. Oh, and it is an “inner journey!”
Doubtless Fox intends well with all this jabberwocky but, though the journey might involve sorting out some of the Christian lumber we all carry in our psyche, it is essentially a uniting of the within and the without, for, to give the impression that Nature can be found by journeying only within is to try to explain architecture to a man kept in a dungeon since birth. You can show him the stones and the mortar in the walls but can you get him to grasp the Alhambra Palace?
Sheldrake, in his rejoinder, returns to his criticisms of science, accusing it now of not being sufficintly internal (subjective?). Yet he says that the scientists’ objectivity is a pretence.
Non-scientific critics of science, feminists in particular, get the wrong end of the stick about the objective method, but Sheldrake shouldn’t because he is a scientist. In scientific methodology, scientists are called upon to try to remain objective, to push emotion and ambition aside and just deal with their observations as honestly as they can.
Now scientists are trained this way, but Sheldrake knows as well as anyone that in practice scientists are always emotionally involved in what they are doing. They are not machines, they are human beings. Aiming for objectivity is to deter them from fiddling their results, for if they do, the openness of science means that sooner or later they will be exposed. But if scientists do an experiment that proves their pet theory, they are naturally overjoyed. If the opposite, they are disgruntled and, in turn, will try to disprove their opponents’ results.
This is why science overall is objective. It is not because scientists have to be emotionless automatons but because crucial results will be carefully checked by those who have something to lose by their acceptance.
Sheldrake goes on and on about what the old view of the soul was, proving with every word that he might have been a scientist by training but he is a Christian by conviction. Scientists aim for Natural truth but Christian truth is something else—it is supernatural truth!
A mistake that modern Pagans make is that something is true because it is old. Sheldrake evidently does the same. If Aristotle thought it, then it must be true, but nowhere does he mention a shred of proof for his ideas of extended consciousness.
The sense of spirituality and communion with Nature (“kinunity”) that it is possible to get can only be natural, however rare and therefore prized it might be. We are plainly linked in a great Chain of Being in Nature, and we might have subtle senses, not yet discovered that occasionally reveal it to us. It is not supernatural, and if Sheldrake finds an experiment that proves his morphic fields, it will prove that they are natural and therefore that the “soul” is natural in his own terms. That will disprove the idea that anyone can save their souls from hell fire. It will disprove Christianity. He must be delighted that no morphic fields have been found.
Science and Prayer
Larry Dossey, who believes that there is sound scientific evidence for the efficacy of prayer, says prayer is not just what we have defined it in our Western, Christianized culture—talking to a male cosmic parent figure who prefers English.
Cross-cultural evidence shows a personal God is not needed in prayer. In Buddhist cultures, Buddhists pray by twirling prayer wheels. Buddhism is not a theistic religion and had no God, but their prayers are answered. What are important are caring, compassion, empathy, and love. Without them, it seems prayer does not work.
Larry Dossey, M.D. is one of an increasing number of medical professionals who do not believe that science and spirituality are irreconcilably separated. He has found 130 scientific studies that show that prayer in the laboratory, under controlled situations, does something remarkable, not just to human beings but to bacteria, fungi, germinating seeds, rats, mice and baby gerbils.
Of these 130 studies, some were extremely clean, well designed, and very precise. Well over half are statistically significant that consciousness influences the material world. It cannot be written off as placebo effect, because many of the studies are not on human beings. Bacteria, fungi, and germinating seeds are not susceptible to suggestion.
This material has been marginalized. Most physicians in medical science will not look at prayer because it does not fit their theories. It is not sufficient to ignore something that works because we have no adequate theory for it. The conditions, boundaries and limits of its success should be investigated and then perhaps hypotheses can be formulated. The point of the scientific method is to guard against self-delusion or subjectivity. Refusing to listen to evidence is not the way of science. The real problem is peer pressure. Doctors fear that if they stood up for such ideas they would never get promotion, or a research grant.
The questions for investigation: Does it work? What is the proof? Are there any side effects? What is the cost effectiveness? The evidence is that some of these therapies are effective and scientists must respect all the data. Science depends upon openness and honesty. The US Government has set up an Office of Alternative Medicine to examine the effectiveness and value of these alternative therapies.
The studies show that prayer—conscious influence—is nonlocal. It functions at a distance and spatial separation does not diminish the affect—so it doesn’t have to be intrusive. You don’t have to impose your own religious or spiritual views on the patient. In fact, you don’t even have to be in the presence of the patient.
Though it is easy for many people to pray for other people, they feel guilty praying for themselves. They should not, providing that the purpose of it is ultimately to benefit the world or others in it. Purely selfish prayer would generate guilt feelings that would counter it, but to pray for health or help to do some good is not selfish. Needless to say prayer does not deliver up material gifts but spiritual benefits. There is no study that shows a prayer to win the lottery is effective. Everyone who buys a ticket hopes or prays it will win, so most of these prayers are not answered.
Well-meaning authors in this New Age get specific about how change should be effected. They propose formulas, like astrologers, but prayer is psychological and has to match people’s temperament. Extroverts and introverts respond differently to styles of prayer. Using a formulaic approach suits our need for easy comprehension and self-medication but the important thing about personal psychological or spiritual matters like prayer is that you should feel comfortable with it. It is no guarantee that it will work because the prayer might be selfish or inappropriate but it should not be discouraging. Prayer cannot yield up the impossible but it can draw upon what is already in the world.
