PsyQuest

There are as many answers to the question as there are questioners. On one level, to answer that question, fill in your vital statistics: Date of Birth, Sex, Race, Name, Marital Status, Education, Occupation … and so forth. Clearly we must be on a different journey than that.

PsyQuest is not agnostic on the one hand, nor doctrinaire on the other. Human spirituality is a unique phenomenon, if not in the universe at least in our direct experience. One way of asking the question is to say, “what is the place of consciousness or intellect in the universe?” PsyQuest verges towards that issue. But we are riding on the crest of the greatest period of discovery that man has ever known. The problem is how to sort through all the things we have learned and come up with a rational yet consistent picture. That is what PsyQuest is about.

The Smart Animal

What characterizes us is the size and complexity of our brain, and the level of intelligence that that brain supports. Other animals struggle with existence in a largely sensory way. Even the brightest of non-humans, such as dolphins or chimanzees, make relatively short journeys into conceptualization, abstract thinking and the language associated with these processes. This doesn’t mean of course that we always act intelligently, relative to the environment or what makes social sense, but we at least have the capacity.

Culture

Culture is the strange phenomenon of developing our shared awareness over time. As large scale things go, culture has been an explosive matter. Over a few thousand years we have gone from stone age to the age of computers and space exploration. Culture changes not only the family of man, but the very environment in which we live. Who am I? A human being in the third millennium AD.

Although we are essentially the same as our forebears, life has become a lot different. Man changes as his culture changes. Changes in culture leave behind a certain amount of wreckage and contradiction. Culture is the repository of values, knowledge, mores and basic convictions about the nature of life itself and the universe in which it occurs.

Tidying up the havoc of cultural development is one of PsyQuest’s objectives.

The Whole Ball Game

The entire saga of humankind is the story of the emergence of abstractive consciousness.

Spirituality is the awareness of one’s own existence, and the challenge of making contact with whatever is the ultimate reality in the Universe.

In this sense, spirituality isn’t any different from being a human being, and being reflexly aware of the experience.

Generally, however, that isn’t what we mean by spirituality. Spirituality tends to refer to working out a relationship with the Deity, or to some dimension of unseen reality.

An important aspect of evolving consciousness is that in its early stages, we had no way of recording or handing on to our young an active memory of the process of evolution itself. In that sense, we weren’t aware of what was occurring. We were busy with surviving, and had not developed the machinery for reflex analysis of the process. It has in fact taken us a very long time to get to the place where we understand enough about the general processes of nature to begin to comprehend the production of our very selves.

Spirituality and Science

Our spiritual tradition has a history of its own. No society has been without its spiritual dimension. If we generalize, we can say that a society’s spiritual tradition is the complex of ways that it deals with life’s mysteries and the ultimate realities in the Universe, whatever those might be.

Our spiritual traditions have tended to find their vehicle in our Religions. This is the clearest locus where our value systems and our ultimate convictions about the universe cluster.

How to reconcile our systematized spiritual traditions with the ongoing adventure of empirical discovery is a major challenge of our times.