Alfred North Whitehead has said: "The mentality of an epoch springs from the view of the world which is, in fact, dominant in the educated sectors of the communities in question." So we may at the outset ask what is the dominant mood, or feeling tone, the dominant view of the world which prevails in today’s western world? One way to state it is to say it is marked by fear which is then masked by desire. Our fear is evident in the preoccupation with crime and crime control, with the proliferation of police, law and crime shows on TV in which our society is depicted as overwhelmingly violent with malevolence evident at all levels. Another picture of our mentality is to consider its underlying mood as one of puzzlement, bewilderment, lack of understanding of any meaning or purpose to it all. The poet Piet Heim said it well: "I’d like to know/ What this show/ Is all about/ Before it’s out!" His words illuminate the eternal cry of the human soul for meaning and purpose. Why am I here? Why is there life?

It is to these now denied and suppressed questions that our culture provides few answers. Science can give us none, nor should it be expected to. As will be noted later, giving these kinds of answers is not the purpose nor province of the scientific endeavor. T.S. Eliot has well termed our situation "The Wasteland", an age in which we "advance progressively backwards" and in which we are the "hollow men, the stuffed men, headpiece filled with straw".

What is the source of this plight in which western civilization finds itself? It is necessary to restate some of the ideas of the first paragraph above in other ways now. To understand our situation we must first realize that we humans now and always have since the fall out of the legendary garden of Eden into consciousness lived in a visionary reality, a world of our mental constructs. To state our situation this way is quite out of harmony with our received model, the Descartian-Newtonian worldview and its development by western science into our contemporary scientistic, materialistic secularized worldview. The usual source of one’s model, one’s worldview is society. The child is carefully, if indeed usually unconsciously, indoctrinated with the worldview of the civilization into which it is born. This process will be explained more fully and critically in later chapters. The essence of this worldview is a "storied" or "mythic" structure, a model which is not given by reality itself, but is a schema for creating a vision of the real. I am using the word myth in the way in which it is used in anthropology and as Alan Watts put it "Myth [does not] mean falsehood, but in a much deeper sense of the word, it is an imagery in terms of which we make sense out of life." From earliest childhood, the infant is told by a thousand and one stories how to perceive/interpret the input of the senses. Thus we learn to live in, to "inhabit" a storied, a mythically constructed world. Further we have "belief" in this world, such profound belief that it is our "taken-for-granted" unquestioned, and unquestionable view of reality. One simply cannot imagine things to be otherwise and thus this worldview becomes the model by which an unconscious processing of all of life’s experiences proceeds.

The model, a living mythology, organizes both persons and culture and the institutions of society, e.g., government, customs, personal life, education, business and even personal life. One can thus speak meaningfully of the dominant myth/model as characterizing and epoch of time. Thus we speak of the Greco-Roman period, of the Medieval period. Of the Modern period and now we need to recognize both a Post Modern period and the beginnings of something beyond that. These themes will be developed further in later chapters.

In the past 500 years we have moved from the Medieval, first into the Modern period (ca 1600CE to 1900CE), and then, to the Post Modern beginning approximately with Einstein’s theory of relativity at the turn of the 20^th century and still regnant. Huston Smith in his book "Beyond the Post Modern Mind" terms these latter two periods the Modern Western Mind and the Post Modern Mind. He suggests that the Post Modern Mind is characterized by a lack of nay comprehensive vision, lacking any unifying worldview/myth. A significant consequence of this lack is a serious loss of common values which are the glue of society such as truth, justice, beauty and the good. Instead we seem to have a social order driven as much by a mood of greed and lust for power as by any other overall motifs. How didi this situation come to be?

To understand this situation, this Post Modern Mind, we must first grasp the essence of the Modern Western Mind. This MWM rests upon several major assumptions, none of which are in the least provable. 1. Faith in the assumption that the universe is a) rational; b) material in essence and, c) understandable by the human mind. 2. That this natural universe is inferior to humans, and subject to our ego-will, i.e., to our dominance (or dominion as the King James Bible put it). 3. Faith in science and technology as the major if not the only ways to our true goals. 4. Those goals may be well defined as the well-ordered and well-supplied society as interpreted in a material sense. Hidden within these assumptions is also the notion that we derive all that we really know through our usual five senses and that we then add to their input such things as values and other qualities which are purely the product of the mind, but in reality have no existence. This is the sensationist theory of knowledge. I am speaking now of the scientific views which came to rule in the 17^th century and have prevailed ever since, though with one significant modification to be noted later. In this view, as Alfred North Whitehead so well put it: "Nature [in itself] is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly. . . .[This view] is the guiding principle of scientific studies ever since. It is still reigning. Every university in the world organizes itself in accordance with it. No alternative system of organizing the pursuit of scientific truth has been suggested. . . .And yet it is quite unbelievable. . .framed in terms of high abstractions, and the paradox only arises because we have mistaken our abstraction for concrete realities.

Almost unnoticed the MWM excluded all except natural substance from its purview as unimportant, or even illusory; viz., the human senses, which cannot be trusted, human feelings, the spiritual realm, God and religion of all sorts, and any notion of transcendence. Of course, the typical scientist of the 17^th, 18^th and many even in the 19^th century considered themselves men of faith and truly trusted in God and were usually participants in organized religion, but their science was very quietly undermining their faith. Religion had constructed its defense by postulating a dualistic world, the physical world and the spiritual world. This metaphysical dualism served to protect the Christian Church’s miracles as supernatural interventions proving the validity of Christianity and its authorized keeper, the Church. But gradually they and we were coming to believe in scientific fact and only scientific fact. Thus all other "facts" of life were becoming dubious, arbitrary.

Though I have stated it very briefly, it is in this way that scientific-materialism destroyed our human spiritual culture as surely and ruthlessly as Western civilization has destroyed every old culture it has come to dominate. Frithjof Schuon has given a beautifully poetic description of what has happened to us:

The principal authority for this model of scientific-materialism is René Descartes and his philosophical heirs. As Jacques Maritain observed fifty years ago:

As this Cartesian illusion became the dominant model for Western thought, religion was gradually relegated to the scrap heap of primitive illusion, needed only by weak people, women and psychotics. It should again be noted that at the outset, the leaders of religion were quite pleased with the Cartesian developments because they seemed to reinforce the Church’s and the Bible’s miracles and authority as supernatural. This dualism of physical and spiritual realms was widely accepted even in the scientific community of the seventeenth century. In his very important and well documented book "Parapsychology, Philosophy and Spirituality A Postmodern Exploration", David Ray Griffin has given a substantial discussion of this development and the reasoning and wishful thinking that prevailed on both sides. He further traces the whys and wherefores in some detail. Those wishing further discussion of this matter should see his first chapter "Parapsychology and Postmodern Philosophy". It is well worth noting that this mechanistic model has dominated not only physics (up till the early 20^th century), but more sadly all the social sciences and through Freud the realms of psychiatry and even pastoral counseling.

Because the "universe is struck dumb", as Schuon put it, we are alienated from the realm of spirit and symbol; thus we are cut in two internally, soul, mind and spirit cut away from brain and perception, so that finally, all we know first hand is ego and its content and these are notoriously imaginary, though seemingly the most real things possible. In this situation, as Joseph Campbell has stated the task: "The hero-deed to be wrought is not today what it was in the century of Galileo. Where then there was darkness, now there is light; but also, where light was, there now is darkness. The modern hero-deed must be that of questing to bring to light again the lost Atlantis of the coordinated soul."

Certainly science, empirical science, has a proper place and role and its value is not to be disregarded, but not as the dominant model, or mythmaker. The late modern western world view (MWM) has thrown us into a void by purporting to encompass the whole of knowledge. This void is of great and disastrous consequence for soul. As Schuon has put it:

Now it is necessary to speak of the specific effects of the MWM on the church and its ministry, both in terms of practice and self-perception, and of the religious response to the MWM. As an obvious fact, the Church and its ministry are not devoid of the Postmodern Mind with its symptoms of meaninglessness and lack of purpose. In a lecture he gave nearly a decade ago, George Heyer, professor of the History of Doctrine and the Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary made some very succinct and pungent comments. After pointing out the ludicrousness of the death of God movement which was enthusiastically received by some gatherings of the Church, he notes that such a response could only occur in the context of a church environment which has lost any profound insight into its tradition and, I add, its answer to Piet Heim’s question. Heyer speculates about this matter:

An equally disastrous response by the churches was documented by James Turner in his I without God, Without creed. His opinion was that the churches not only failed to make an adequate response to the culture of the Enlightenment, but in fact supported the collapse of faith by fighting the wrong battles on the wrong issues, losing not only the battles, but the war itself. The Church’s leaders either adopted the new paradigm of knowledge seemingly wholeheartedly, thus losing their theological identity, or ignored it altogether, thus becoming an intellectual backwater. I have referred above to some of the reasons these moves took place.

To reiterate and summarize: The main religious problem we face is that the MWM has denied us the right to believe by claiming in the name of science that the claims of religion are false or illusionary. Education in Western civilization means being indoctrinated into the MWM; this worldview dominates from kindergarten through graduate school. This view provides no ground for values, no access to soul, no basis for religious faith, no hope for a life beyond death. As T.S. Eliot said "This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper." Yet, I do not think we need abandon hope by any means, for their are strong signs that new possibilities are emerging for a renewal of religious faith, if not of the churches who wish to stay with their old ways and thought patterns.

First, I would note that senior scientists, especially in physics, have long since abandoned the MWM. They, like Whitehead, saw its illusions and pretensions. Some of the signs of hope are found in change within the area of science itself. First, there is a recovery of the notion of "limits", i.e. what science really is and what it can legitimately tell us. As Werner Heisenberg says, "Science is not a philosophy developing a worldview of nature as a whole or about the essence of things." Another great physicist long ago pointed up what he called the most essential insight of modern physics as follows: "We have found that where science has progressed the farthest, the mind has but regained from nature that which the mind has put into nature. We have found a strange footprint on the shores of the unknown. We have devised profound theories, one after another, to account for its origin. At last we have succeeded in reconstructing the creature that made the footprint. And lo! It is our own."

Physics and the insights of the leading physicists are important because this field has been the model for the scientific method generalized across the various fields. Thus a few more of the insights of prominent 20^th century physicists seem pertinent to help us get freed from the grip of the MWM. Physics does not and cannot by virtue of its limits support religion, so we should not look for it to do so. But equally important, physics no longer disputes the truths of religion proper. Here we need to recall the discredited dualistic metaphysics which the Church used in the 17^th century to support its claim to authority based on the miracles of the New Testament. That discredited metaphysic was not and is not a problem of physics, although it may have seemed so because physics choose to deal with the material side of the dualism, i.e., the physical world. Eddington and a number of other physicists realized that there is a whole other realm higher than the material, the realm that traditionally is called spirit—a structure lying behind, so to speak, the physical. It will be necessary to explain more fully what is meant by the realm of spirit later. But the essential point is that the so-called war between science and religion is actually a dead issue and that it began because of serious mistakes in thought on both sides of the question and because of false claims on each side.

Many highly respected scientists have seen through the fallacies of the MWM and are pointing to the mystical experiential realm called spirit as the most important aspect of life and, due to the overriding influence of the MWM and the ill informed response of the churches , the most neglected realm of human life. Only in the past decade those experiences called parapsychological have gained new respectability after a hundred years of despite by most scientists on the ground that "they could not happen". In general scientists refused even to investigate the phenomenon and scoffed at those who did as fools or worse, naves. I will return to this topic in more detail later.

My thesis at this point has to do with the necessary revisions in our cosmology, theology and thus for the practice of professions as varied as ministry, counseling and medicine to mention only three. The thesis is that the knowledge arrived at from the mystical-spiritual tradition and the parapsychological can provide us with needed, missing, insights for the construction of a new metaphysic which is congenial to these aspects of human experience, but will not deny the valid insights arrived at with the MWM. But in order to open our minds to this information it will be necessary to rethink and rework the MWM, i.e. scientific-materialism, to keep what in it is relevant and valid and to assay what aspects of it are applicable to psychology and other social sciences along with theology and medicine.

The neglected side of religious tradition is also that called by many scholars of religion the ESOTERIC as opposed to the EXOTERIC. It is the exoteric which has provided the basis for most of the ideas of the nature, role and basis of ministry and for the understanding of human nature prevailing within the religious context. The exoteric is the commonly accepted mode of religious life as practiced within the churches and its theology is mostly of the nature called cataphatic, which in effect means that God is conceived as totally other, somewhat disconnected from human life in the world, mostly not experienced at all, at least any more as compared to the Biblical times. God is out there, or up there, but certainly not in here. Classical theism, i.e., traditional theology, essentially holds this view of God. This view is what is taught, with some notable exceptions, by the theological seminaries.

The important note here is that in this view God is not known as a living experience, whose presence is the only authority. Most creeds say that "revelation has ceased", everything needed has been revealed; usually meaning in the Bible, but sometimes a lot of doctrine gets equal billing. In the Protestant context, for example, the ideas of Luther or Calvin take on a special authority beyond that of current teachers. Likewise, often, the creeds or confessions of some past era are elevated to a place of special importance not quite equal to the Bible, but of great power.

Some of this is no doubt legitimate and useful, but it will do little or nothing to meet the crisis we face in the Church and in the world, most especially the crisis of the human soul without God. The point is that this latter, the exoteric tradition, especially burdened down with its entanglement with dualism and the outdated war with science cannot do the job. Its notion of God is problematic, providing no means of contact with God here and now. Or to say it another way, its notion of god is too exclusively transcendent with little or no immanence.

The esoteric is a considerable contrast. Even though it usually grows out of the exoteric as a seedbed, some experience, some life event, possibly a spiritual catastrophe, possibly a seemingly ordinary event, thrusts or lures one out of the exoteric mode, or out of satisfaction with it. What then ensues may be as varied as atheism, cynicism, or a lively, powerful, search for God. If one follows this search seriously, a long preparation of mind and heart ensues, a lifelong process.

Somewhat early in this quest, the clear boundaries of subject-object thinking, which began in the mythical Garden of Eden and which have been so firmly reinforced by the late MWM, will begin to weaken and finally fall away almost entirely. I do not mean that one no longer will be able to discern the difference between oneself and another, or between the gate and the gatepost, as it were. It is rather that instead the boundaries that the ordinary worldview has held as fixed and immovable, begin to weaken and seem arbitrary or even illusory. Because these boundaries form the matrix of ordinary human life and world, this shift is no small change. Recall, if you have read it, the story of Carlos Castaneda at the hands of Don Juan as told in "Journey to Ixtlan". Don Juan tells Carlos that he must "stop the world", i.e., he must stop constructing the world in accord with the normal social construction of reality because that way is quite false. For Carlos, this idea is literally mind-blowing; he cannot take it in.

The esoteric way, i.e., the spiritual-contemplative way prepares one for a vision, a glimpse, an experience of that which has historically been referred to as the realm of spirit. Please note here that I am not implying the old dualistic worldview which separated reality into the material and the spiritual. At the moment I simply want to point out that the spiritual-contemplative or meditative way brings one into the capabilities of seeing/experiencing that which was not known previously. Especially important is the glimpse it gives, or the realization of, the essential oneness of reality, its essential unity, including God, the Ultimate, the Source.

This path leads beyond simple ego-consciousness, simple individuality, and it goes by the way of humility as well as oneness. It includes openness vs. closed-mindedness, compassion vs. self-centered thought, and unity with the Divine vs. alienation. Long ago Irenaeus said it this way: "God became what we are in order that we might become what he is". The spiritual-contemplative tradition might go even further and said God made us in the image of God in order that we might realize our innate godness and live accordingly.

The late Modern Western Mind, otherwise known as scientific-materialism, has become the dominant mode of consciousness of Western Civilization. It has permeated all our culture because it has become the principle model of reality of Western culture, its institutions, its government, its schools, and to a degree even its churches. This model, by claiming to be the only right way of knowing reality, destroyed the foundation of faith in God, most forms of religion and the mystical way of knowing, experiencing reality. Effectively this change was a seismic shift and his precipitated both church and culture as well as individual life into a chaotic crisis situation. Many of our institutions are floundering, or flopping about trying to find their purpose in this morass of confusion. The effects can be seen in elements of culture as varied as the medical profession, politics, education and the churches.

However, the more recent discoveries of science, especially physics, of its own limits of applicability and the revitalization of parapsychology as its discoveries are validated have opened up new opportunities. The Church badly muffed its dealings with the emergence of the early modern Western worldview by opting for it as a support for dualism and later fought science on the wrong grounds. Today, the tradition of the spiritual-contemplative way, the esoteric side of religion offers a rich heritage not only of cosmology, but of practice which can provide the means for a recovery of religious life.