The Presence of the Infinite by Steve McIntosh

Author:Steve McIntosh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quest Books
Published: 2015-08-11T00:00:00+00:00

Our Emerging Understanding of the “Physics” of Spirit

In this chapter, we have used evolutionary spirituality’s newly available light to wrestle with some advanced spiritual concepts. But no matter how far our spiritual knowledge may advance, our human understanding of the purpose of the universe will present only a rudimentary picture pieced together from the shadows cast by spirit into the realm of reason and experience.

Nonetheless, realizing philosophically that “the presence of the infinite” is an actual, ontological description of the referent of spiritual experience reveals how the metaphysical and supernatural are actually quite “natural” under this broadened understanding. This spiritual reality is confirmed when we begin to see how it influences the evolution of self, culture, and nature. As I have argued, the infinite moves the finite toward perfection through its influence on the consciousness of free-will creatures, drawing us like iron filings toward a magnet. And as spirit appears to us in the form of the beautiful, the true, and the good, we can feel its palpable gravity—its peculiar magnetic aspect. As philosopher John Cottingham has observed, these intrinsic values somehow have “to-be-pursuedness” built into them.12

This emerging knowledge of what spirit is and how it works enhances our ability to have and share spiritual experiences. And as we come to better understand what it is, the reality of spirit can be increasingly confirmed through phenomenological experience, just like other widely accepted facts. Moreover, as this kind of experience becomes more familiar and understandable, attempts to explain it away or reduce it to the physical activity in our brains will be increasingly recognized as merely the rhetoric of an outworn belief system.

However, even as our understanding of spirit becomes more “naturalized” and we accordingly achieve a more unified knowledge of physics and metaphysics, we must remain circumspect. The perhaps worthy but naïve goal of developing a science of spirit that establishes a particular form of belief as factually confirmed and objective (thus eliminating spiritual pluralism) may never be achieved. And even if such a spiritual science were theoretically possible, it is still well beyond the current horizon of our cultural evolution.

Nevertheless, the goal of building cultural agreement around the spiritual authenticity of the beautiful, the true, and the good is certainly achievable in our time. Although such an emerging agreement about the transcendent reality of intrinsic value would not constitute a science of spirit in itself, it could take us beyond the currently impoverished state of spiritual ignorance that prevails in much of the developed world. The metaphysics of such an agreement would necessarily be modest and minimal, and subject to different interpretations, but such a new form of concurrence around the basic reality of spirit would help us overcome the blindness asserting that the universe is nothing more than matter in motion. And the emergence of a relatively universal agreement that spirit by whatever name actually exists would indeed result in a greater sense of social solidarity and cooperation, and thereby supply some of the spiritual leadership our civilization needs.

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