You are here: Home » Archives for Carter Phipps

Author Archive for Carter Phipps

Carter Phipps is the Executive Editor of EnlightenNext magazine. Follow him on Twitter @Carter_Phipps.

Discovering the Spirit of Fire (Think About This)

by Carter Phipps

When it comes to the great founders of evolutionary spirituality in the twentieth century—individuals like Henri Bergson, Teilhard de Chardin, Sri Aurobindo, Jean Gebser, and Alfred North Whitehead—we have an inexcusable lack of good biographies to guide our appreciation of their pioneering work. The recent biography, The Lives of Sri Aurobindo, by scholar Peter Heehs is one exception. The work of scholar Ursula King is another. King’s book, Spirit of Fire: The Life and Vision of Teilhard de Chardin is a powerful and illuminating work that captures the spirit of Teilhard’s remarkable evolutionary vision and passion. Beginning with his childhood days in the verdant hills of Auvergne, France, she follows his prolific life from France to China, to his travels around the world, all the way to his final days in the gritty streets of New York City. “However far back I go into my memories (even before the age of ten),” Teilhard once wrote, “I can distinguish in myself the presence of a strictly dominating passion: the passion for the Absolute.” Driven by this inner calling, this unique scientist/mystic searched the outer world for ancient biological fossils and plumbed the inner world for new spiritual truths.

King’s Spirit of Fire is a highly recommended introduction to Teilhard’s life and is liberally sprinkled with quotes and observations from his visionary mind. In the following excerpt from the book, King explains why she feels the great Jesuit’s thinking is so salient to our own time in history: Continue reading…

Share This:

Aug 24, 2011 | 1 comment | View Post

A Great Story (Think About This)

If Homer was alive in the twenty-first century, he would not be telling stories about ships and seas, sirens and sailors. Surely, the great bard would represent our moment in history with a myth that captures the essence of our contemporary zeitgeist. What would such a myth look like? In their new book, Journey of the Universe, Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker invite us into the scientific story of the Universe, imbuing it with all the passion and purpose of a great religious myth. Their “invitation into grandeur” carries us into the heart of a story that Homer would have loved to tell—the story of how life began, evolved, and turned into you and me.

We are the first generation to learn the comprehensive scientific dimensions of the universe story. We know that the observable universe emerged 13.7 billion years ago, and we now live on a planet orbiting our Sun, one of the trillions of stars in one of the billions of galaxies in an unfolding universe that is profoundly creative and interconnected. With our empirical observations expanded by modern science, we are now realizing that our universe is a single intense energy event that began as a tiny speck that has unfolded over time to become galaxies and stars, palms and pelicans, the music of Bach and each of us alive today. The great discovery of contemporary science is that the universe is not simply a place, but a story—a story in which we are immersed, to which we belong, and out of which we arose.

You can learn more about Swimme and Tucker’s new book at journeyoftheuniverse.org.

Share This:

Jul 13, 2011 | 28 comments | View Post

The Subtle Trap of the Messianic Meme (Think About This)

by Carter Phipps

Our society is very familiar with apocalyptic thinking—especially when it comes clothed in religious garb. Indeed, it seems that every few years another date for the rapture or end of the world or the return of Christ is set, anticipation reaches a fever pitch, and then the day goes by with no noticeable change in our global social order. Then speculation dies down for some time before another date is set by yet another religious leader filled with messianic conviction. But religions are not the only place we find such convictions. In his latest blog posts, EnlightenNext Executive Editor Carter Phipps argues that messianic thinking has become quite attractive in progressive circles as well, where so many people believe that we are reaching some sort of culmination of history and that we need some sort of era-defining event to pave the way to a new future. He calls our attention to the dangers of this way of thinking and suggests that the hype around 2012 as the final year on the Mayan calendar is just the latest example:

2012 is the progressive version of traditional eschatological thinking. It’s the idea that an event is going to occur that is dramatically outside the normal processes of history and change everything, lifting the majority of humanity to a higher level of consciousness and creating a more enlightened future. There are darker versions as well, where a sort of mini-apocalypse has to occur before we get to the better side of the future, but generally 2012 represents a positive version of eschatological thinking. It’s a more benign strain, we might say, but it’s still the same basic song, just a prettier arrangement.

Read part one of this post, “Apocalypse Now, Progressive Style.”

Read part two of this post, “No More Messiahs (Part II).”

Share This:

Jul 09, 2011 | 6 comments | View Post

Worldviews in Dialogue 1. Superman Explores His Sensitive Side

by Carter Phipps

In this new series, Worldviews in Dialogue, we want to explore the interior nature of different historical worldviews, comparing and contrasting the values, perspective, and the quality of consciousness intrinsic to different types of worldviews both in contemporary, and sometimes ancient, culture. We hope to use art, literature, pop culture, media and just about every other form of cultural expression to illustrate the ever-fascinating differences between these deep underlying structures of consciousness that have informed the evolution of human culture.

Modernism and Postmodernism. We use these words a lot on this blog to talk about the difference between two worldviews, two fundamentally different sets of values, two historically different ways in which human beings have constructed the world around them and made meaning. And whether we’re talking about Spiral Dynamics, Integral Philosophy, developmental psychology, or some other school of thought or research that identifies the critical importance of worldviews in the evolution of consciousness and culture, it is important to have a deep understanding of exactly what makes up the differences between these two stages of culture.

Of course, when we’re talking about such broad yet fundamental distinctions, the differences express themselves in myriad ways but are not always exact or perfectly clear cut. Yet as culture has changed over the last hundreds of years we know that there are certainly real differences between the values and perspective of a modern worldview that emerged on the cultural scene in the European Enlightenment and the values and perspective of a postmodern one that has been on the mainstream cultural stage since the 60s.

Modernism calls to mind things like scientific insight, reason and rationality, nation-states, industrialization, democracy, Newtonian physics, etc. The postmodern worldview calls to mind environmentalism, political correctness, pluralism and equality, respect for marginalized peoples and indigenous cultures, the breakdown of hierarchy, self-awareness and self-exploration, etc. Continue reading…

Share This:

Jun 27, 2011 | 8 comments | View Post

A Critique of 2012 and the Messianic Meme

by Carter Phipps

Share This:

Jun 14, 2011 | 0 comments | View Post

No More Messiahs (Part II)

by Carter Phipps

In my last post, “Apocalypse Now, Progressive Style,” I spoke about both the messianic tendencies that arise in traditional religious cultures the world over and the surprisingly similar tendencies toward eschatological thinking that we see even in progressive culture. I asked how we can find our way to a legitimate idealism about the development of human culture without falling prey to the mind-trap of messianic thinking.

A few years ago, I was doing research on an article on messianic thinking, and I came across a fascinating historical tidbit from the nineteenth century about Anne Besant, who had been a women’s rights activist in London before joining the Theosophical Society and eventually becoming its president. Besant was an interesting character for many reasons, but she is perhaps best known for her efforts to find the young boy who was supposed to grow up to be the World Teacher of the Theosophical Society. That boy was Jiddu Krishnamurti, the great twentieth-century teacher who rejected his association with Theosophy along with any sort of messianic titles and became a powerful independent philosopher/teacher in his own right.

It’s a fascinating story in many respects, but what struck me at the time was the reason for Besant’s messianic turn. It seems that she was incredibly passionate about progressive causes at the time, and amidst difficult conditions of the poor, and the squalor and poverty of an industrializing London, she began to lose faith in the modernizing forces at work in the economics of the day. After a flirtation with Marxism she met Helen Blavatsky, founder of Theosophy, and became interested in those esoteric teachings.

I’m sure there were many reasons for Besant’s interest in Theosophy, not the least being her own longtime spiritual interests, but one reason struck me as important: she was losing faith in the capacity of progressive causes to make a difference in the rapidly industrializing homeland. Continue reading…

Share This:

Jun 08, 2011 | 23 comments | View Post

Behold the “Possibilian” (Think About This)

by Carter Phipps

David Eagleman is a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine who is searching for a middle place between the dogmatic certainties of both religion and science. Between the New Atheists’ unequivocal rejection of God and traditional religious believers’ embrace of the same, a whole host of other possibilities, according to Eagleman, are getting squeezed out of the picture. He even has a name for the person who occupies that middle place—a possibilian. A possibilian is a person who acknowledges that our understanding of how the universe works is extremely limited and our ignorance truly vast. A possibilian shies away from anything that even hints at dogma or final certainty and allows the tools of science to sort out truth from falsehood. The following talk, taken from TED Houston, is an eloquent call for a spirit of humility and an attitude of exploration as we move toward a deeper understanding of ourselves and the universe.

View David Eagleman’s TED Talk on YouTube »

To read our review of David Eagleman’s book Sum, click here (and scroll down the page).

Share This:

Jun 01, 2011 | 19 comments | View Post

Apocalypse Now, Progressive Style – Part I

by Carter Phipps

May 21^st. Apocalypse now. The rapture has come and gone. At least that’s the story as told by the latest Christian end-times believers who think that the world is coming to an end—oh, a few days ago. People quit jobs, spent their savings, said goodbye to friends and family—all with the firm belief that last exit to heaven was actually here. One couple in Florida spent their life savings, because why would they need it after May 21^st? Yes, it’s crazy. Yes, it’s sad. Yes, this seems to happen about once every five years. Yes, it’s hard to believe in a modern age that this kind of thinking can still flourish to such a degree.

In academia they call this sort of thing eschatological thinking or golden age millennialism (the reference is from the Bible where Christ will eventually reign in paradise for 1000 years). Truth be told, this kind of thing has always been a fundamental part of religious traditions. While it may have been weaned out of some over the last few hundred years, it’s hardly a side issue. Just about every major religion, even Buddhism, has some kind of central messianic eschatological tradition. If it’s not the second coming of the Christ, it’s the return of the Mahdi, or the coming of the Maitreya, or the appearance of the Kalki, the end of the Iron Age, the coming of a new Jerusalem, the return of Quezacotl, the…well, you get the idea. And even today, most religious traditions still have a rich and active eschatological strain.

I wrote a great deal about this in an article almost a decade ago (which you can find here). It’s a fascinating subject. And even after failure upon failure, people are shockingly undeterred. End times thinking is one of those mind viruses that simply won’t bow to the reality of failure. Continue reading…

Share This:

May 24, 2011 | 7 comments | View Post

The Remarkable Plurality of the Singularity (Think About This)

by Carter Phipps

The winner of the 2003 Templeton Prize, Holmes Ralston III has blazed a long and distinguished career exploring the relationship between nature, science, and religious inspiration. As one of the brightest lights in the dialogue between science and religion, he has fused his deep ecological concerns, his passion for philosophy, and a strong religious sensibility into a career exploring the significance of what it means to be human at this unique moment in history.

In his latest work, Three Big Bangs: Matter-Energy, Life, Mind, Ralston takes on the biggest of the big subjects—the foundations of matter, life, and mind. He suggests that there have been three big bangs in the history of our universe. Science has given us the primordial big bang, the genesis of matter, and has documented the genesis of life on Earth. But Ralston is determined to give equal weight to the third singularity, the human singularity, the internal big bang that gave birth to the mind of the Homo sapiens. He writes:

We can take Albert Einstein as an icon of discovering the first big bang in the astronomical heavens (or at least of contemporary physics); we can take Charles Darwin as an icon of discovering the second big bang, evolutionary life on earth. But then the third big bang inescapably confronts us. Continuing to take Einstein and Darwin as icons, the marvel is not just in the heavens above or Earth beneath; the marvel is equally, indeed more so, the human minds capable of such knowledge.

You can find Holmes Ralston’s Three Big Bangs: Matter-Energy, Life, Mind at the following link: http://cup.columbia.edu/book/978-0-231-15639-4/three-big-bangs

Author Archive for Carter Phipps

Discovering the Spirit of Fire (Think About This)

A Great Story (Think About This)

The Subtle Trap of the Messianic Meme (Think About This)

Worldviews in Dialogue 1. Superman Explores His Sensitive Side

A Critique of 2012 and the Messianic Meme

No More Messiahs (Part II)

Behold the “Possibilian” (Think About This)

Apocalypse Now, Progressive Style – Part I

The Remarkable Plurality of the Singularity (Think About This)

Whitehead Revealed

Stay Connected!
Sign Up for "Think About This"

About EnlightenNext

Recent Posts

Our Sites & Blogs

Sites We Like

Author Archive for Carter Phipps

Stay Connected!Sign Up for "Think About This"

About EnlightenNext

Recent Posts

Our Sites & Blogs

Sites We Like

Stay Connected!
Sign Up for "Think About This"