The ‘Universe’
To simplify this topic, I am going to refer to the Human Potential Movement (HPM) as a blanket term for a phenomenon that does not have defined parameters, in which certain language, models and concepts revolve loosely around the term ‘the Universe’ to describe the Source, the Creator and Sustainer of all things.
The Universe seems like a more neutral term whereas the word ‘God’ is loaded. As I pointed out some years ago the only answer to the question Do you believe in God? is, “Well, that depends what you mean by God”. What the question means in the mind of the questioner may be so far removed from what I am prepared to assent to, an affirmative answer would be substantially untrue and could mark me out as ‘one of us’ when I’m definitely not! I need to emphasize again that what I am saying about God in this discussion is a parody, a mock-up of the sort of beliefs and attitudes that are commonly held about God by people who have never seen much point in the Deity but find in ‘the Universe’ something satisfying and meaningful.
For a start, the Universe is abundant and wants you to be abundant and happy. God loves you and wants you to be abundant and happy, the fact is actually basic to Christian belief but it has been overlaid with so many conditions Divine Love seems to be less reliable than the love of your average human parent. (Hardly God’s fault, one might say!) One of my favourite quotes, “God is happy and wants us to join in” is entirely in line with New Testament theology but has never really been in the forefront of Christian teaching. The implications of this seemingly cute statement are huge and life-changing and they are absolutely on target with the thinking of the HPM.
The basis for the belief in the Universe as the Benign Source is in quantum physics of which it is said by those who know, that if you say you understand it you are wrong. The only parameters for the Universe are scientific which, since no-one really understands anyway, the concept remains fluid and free from doctrinal restrictions. It is both more and less personal and leaves the responsibility for life, where it belongs, with the individual, and this seems to work for people the world over. As we have seen this has much in common with the mystic’s position.
To quote from a recent communication from a leader in human potential field,
We live in a conscious universe. Consciousness is the foundation of the universe. The universe is created by consciousness and made up of consciousness. That consciousness is in everything in the universe. That includes every human being. The consciousness in you is one with the consciousness of the whole universe. When you realize this, you understand that you are everything and you have everything.
This is a decent summary of the meaning of ‘the Universe’ in the HPM but we have to realise that with HPM we are not referring to an association, organisation or club. It would be a distortion to write as though there is homogeneity among those who are exploring this representation of spirituality. Not to have rules, boundaries, strict definition, ‘shoulds’ and ‘should-nots’ is of the essence of this quest. It is a movement in consciousness and its many proponents will express themselves differently and not necessarily agree. For example, some would substitute the word ‘energy’ for ‘consciousness’ in the above quote. To be fair I must make the point here too that not all writers avoid the use of ‘God’. Here is one typical example “Freedom comes from understanding ourselves and our relationship to God.” St. Paul would not have argued with that!
Fortunately, it is not my purpose to sort out, clarify nor promote the various shades of belief, and I am going to sit lightly, too on the science behind it. The reliance on scientific research is one of the vital bases of the movement, in particular on neuro-science, as well as on the amazing, confusing and logic-defying conclusions of quantum physics.
One of the happiest differences between God and the Universe is that the latter likes women and wants them to have full, enjoyable lives even if they are mothers, whereas the God of the church has, from earliest times, been promoted as expecting every virtue and self-giving from women for whom to think of their own needs was sin and selfishness.
For anyone interested in following up the research, the work of Dawson Church, author of the previous quote, is a good and reliable place to start; David Feinstein and Joe Dispenza are two other writers whose work is very strongly based in neuro-science. One woman whom I particularly enjoy, Dr. Kim D’Eramo, a medical doctor, summed up the HPM when she said, “Collectively we are creating a new basis for society.” That there are millions of people world-wide who are changing from a materialist view to a more spiritual understanding of what makes for real encourages one to believe she’s on track.
My design here is to take a few concepts which seem to be ubiquitous and essential to any understanding of the Human Potential Movement and see how they impact on, support or contradict Christian practice, or more purposely, the teaching of the New Testament, where the ideal of a New Creation is central, however differently it may have been conceived.
It is obvious that one could take the quote from Dawson Church and substitute ‘God’ for ‘consciousness’ and find nothing contradictory to Christian teaching but you may find a little hesitation over the phrase ‘you have everything’. You may even find a head-on collision! Poverty has always been seen as such a hall-mark of the truly devout that we are inclined to view the idea of desiring abundance somewhat sourly. Abundance, Christians have been encouraged to believe, is a spiritual value, a card probably cashed in after death. That is not the teaching of Jesus who came “that you might have life and have it more abundantly”.
Enjoying the good things of creation is suspect, we have too many examples of profiteering, selfishness, the ruination of the beauty of the earth and so many evils associated with the lust for material gain; this is not real abundance this is substitution. Furthermore, real abundance is for everyone and that is what we find at the heart of the best of HPM teaching. Mindless profiteering is anything but this and sadly it is also true that these current ideas are just as open to misrepresentation and power play as Christianity or any other human association ever has been.
It cannot be denied that what is known as ‘The law of attraction’ has been interpreted to mean that “the Universe is like a great big catalogue from which you can order whatever you want”. This idea is intricately tied in with the understanding that “your thoughts make your reality”. This notion has a very long history and is now underpinned by some almost alarming science; quite, quite fascinating but a rabbit hole down which I must choose not to run at this time. There is masses of material available for anyone who wants to know more, both in research and on YouTube etc.
The statement that life is meant to be abundant is not an easy ‘please myself to have everything I want’, attitude, that is a travesty. It is, like all of life, subject to consciousness and awareness; what abundance means to you may be very different even from what it means to your nearest and dearest.
Alongside the enthusiasm for abundance goes gratitude. The importance of gratitude is emphasized in so much of the writing; even being thankful for those things which on the surface may not look like something to be pleased about. This is not the ‘toxic positivity’ that refuses to acknowledge that anything unpleasant is real but rather the consciousness that stays honestly with what is even when the gratitude is only for your capacity to hang in there! St Augustine (the Hippo one) famously said “The reward of patience is patience” I think the reward of gratitude is gratitude, the ever-deepening delight and joy that grows as we allow ourselves to rejoice in all that life brings, especially when we can do that with the dreary bits of our own selves. Developing our awareness to include compassion for ourselves when we are dismal is a very advanced state of consciousness! It is also central to the Christian message, if God loves and accepts us as boring, ordinary and dreary then there is no reason not to love our boring selves!
That brings us to the core of the HPM – self-love. As discussed in Part I, current attitudes to loving oneself have undergone a huge revision, especially in the area of child-rearing, where the life patterns are laid down. The capacity for genuine self-love is the sign of a truly advanced soul. In the twelfth century, St. Bernard (the Clairvaux one) pronounced that it was an easy thing to love the poor and needy compared to the task of “loving oneself perfectly, for Christ’s sake.” Self-giving is the result of self-love not its contrary. People who truly love and accept themselves are comfortable with truly self-giving. The kind of negative attitudes that are traditionally associated with self-love, selfishness, carelessness, self-absorption, pride etc. are the signs of a self so doubting itself that it must project something perceived as stronger to boost the frail ego. Christ could give Himself perfectly because He loved Himself perfectly. As a Man that’s what sets Him apart from the rest of us! It has been shown beyond dispute that people who truly love and respect themselves show love and respect for all people.
The insistence that self- care, self- respect, self-love is the starting point for authentic living is the hall-mark not only of this movement we are looking at but of therapy in all its varieties, psychology, body-work etc. etc. etc. It has to be said that the church has not caught up with this knowledge that is now so general to be a commonplace.
This failure to move beyond its historic concentration on the sinfulness of humanity is one thing that makes the church irrelevant, uninteresting and out-moded in practice. As I do rather go on about the stress the church has always placed on the irreducible nature of sin in humankind it would be a serious omission if I didn’t include here some observations about ‘sin’ in HPM. I put the word in commas because while God and prayer are words frequently avoided the word sin is never mentioned! As Julian of Norwich famously observed “Sin is behovely” – i.e., you can’t get away without it, but as we saw earlier, how we understand human frailty, weakness, or wickedness today is a far cry from the black/white, right/wrong categories of previous times.
Among devotees of HPM there are those who take a “Pollyanna” kind of attitude to the negativity that doesn’t suit their desire for ‘positive living’. A therapist in the field labeled this ‘Toxic Positivity’ which is a very good term. However, there are much more balanced approaches to meeting and dealing with the less attractive sides of being human which are in line with good therapeutic practice.
Here are a few common-sense examples, the first takes the computer for an analogy. “If your computer is full of viruses there’s no point in trying to upload new good information onto it, first you must cleanse the system of all the junk”. Another way of saying it is you cannot have a beautiful clean house if you don’t clear out all the mess first. In other words, in order to grow into our full potential and become the people we are capable of being we have to become aware of the habits, attitudes etc. that hold us back or sabotage our efforts. In the different practices known as energy psychology there are various means promoted to engage with this vital work.
The work does not begin with self-condemnation, that is so important. If one starts from being ‘wrong’ there is no room for patient understanding, nowhere to go except into penitence (which may be healthy) or guilt (which certainly is not) and ‘must try harder’.
I would like to quote a typical HPM example of a more useful approach to bring about change. It observes four states which are most common underlying causes for the pain, distress, aggravation and harm we do to ourselves and others. They are fear, the need to control, judgement and unforgiveness. One is encouraged to investigate with courage and honesty how these show up in one’s life; fear of course being the over-riding emotion, though hidden; self-forgiveness probably the hardest to clear or own. Then there are protocols, practices etc., based in sound neuro-psychology, that can help make the shifts to more wholesome habits and more satisfying life.
Another area of Christian practice which has come into the limelight under the impact of quantum physics though, of course, the language has changed, is that of prayer, in particular intercessory prayer, (prayer for others). The unaccountable ways in which energy and thoughts can cover time and space has caused serious research into prayer and healing and especially distance healing. Instead of healing ’miracles’ being ‘woo-woo’ or ‘originally misdiagnosed’ they are now a respectable area of research and are talked about in high class academic circles even as, like so much else of that sort, the discussion hasn’t ‘hit the streets’. A vast amount of research into the effectiveness of prayer is easily available on the net.
Prayer is another activity in which devotees of the Universe as the Source of all things have taken up the reality and re-named it for practical use. How many different ways can you tell someone that because you care for them and they are in some distress you want to share their pain? Saying “I will pray for you” is language used easily only among those of a shared religious sensibility; now we veer away from that expression of love and go for ‘thinking about’, ‘sending loving energy’, ‘intending your good’ or some such circumlocution. “That which we call a rose…..”
It is not too great a stretch to propose that one could also substitute the word ‘love’ for ‘consciousness’ in the Dawson quote. In the docco Down the Rabbit Hole one of the scientists explains that at the utterly fundamental level of all that is there is love. That is why the mystics of any tradition, or none, Christianity in the words of Jesus and the claims of the HPM all say that we are one, that the whole of creation is One. And that is why one can talk about God or one can talk about the Universe and know one is speaking of Ultimate Meaning
Love as a title for the Source of all is another way in which the spirituality matches up to common mystical experience, Love being the expression of and for the Divine Ultimate Mystery
Recently I have come across a further field of research called ‘emotional contagion’ which sounds dire but is quite the opposite! An example will make the point. People all over the world meditating are affecting the global state, the more people do it the more people ‘catch on’ and so it spreads. Whenever you are thinking ‘prayerfully’ about someone or something and you recollect that there are millions all over the world meditating too you are part of something that is so much bigger and greater than you. You get why they say ‘contagion’? Science has proved that flu bugs are not the only form of world-wide contagion! Love and desire for the well-being of all is contagious!!!
Somehow love is at the core of it all whatever Source one posits. It is almost as though, through the explorations of the quantum world science is affirming all that is best and enduring about Christian teaching and dumping that which is time-conditioned and fitted only for an age long gone. Paring away the pre-scientific world view and the accretions of church culture that it produced, the God of Jesus and St. Paul is as comprehensive and appealing as is ‘the Universe’. They are recognizably the same Reality, both mysterious, beyond ultimate understanding, with the motivating Force being a kind of love that surpasses our comprehension but not our experience.
