Metaview

We have discovered our body so to speak. In so doing, have we lost our soul?

Over the last several generations of our race, we have found out a great deal about the underpinnings of our relationship to the physical universe. That has thrown much light on our psychological and spiritual history. This has caused a very bumpy and jerky shifting of gears. We are far from having the transition assimilated and digested.

Man walks out of the mists of antiquity having developed a wide range of skills: our ancestors learned how to hunt, tend crops and build great cities. Though the exaggeration is significant, we are told that Ninevah was a vast community, and that it took the prophet Jonah three days to walk through it. Well, probably not, unless he was a very slow walker. But there is no doubt that the children of man had made considerable progress by the time the Bible, and, contemporaneously, the Homeric Poems, were written.

An anomaly is true about the human species: among all the beasts of field and forest, this bipedal abstracting creature was the most intelligent, and the most prepared to attack his environment with this most flexible of instruments, the mind. But, although no one told him about the deficiency, he started out with very little understanding of the actual constitution of this world he inhabited. Realistically, he was not at home in his home, and that alienation has plagued his footsteps through history.

During the early history of culture, thinkers focused on moral and spiritual dimensions of human experience. Many of most dearly cherished convictions about the place of mankind in creation date from these centuries. It is not our objective to destroy spiritual insight and sensitivity. However, to the extent that spiritual insights are negatively affected by false convictions about the physical universe, broader horizons may need to be developed.

The development of empirical science has been meteoric in its rapidity. We have not fully adjusted to the conclusions of historically recent developments. The twentieth century of the current era has brought more change to our understanding of the world than any similar period since we walked out into the stage of history. We wonder what further discoveries lie ahead.

To a considerable extent, there is clash between our ageold spiritual traditions and the recent discoveries we have made about ourselves and the cosmos we inhabit. Tricky though it may be, the cultural, spiritual, and scientific challenge of the third Millennium is the development of Metaview, a synthesis of the truths to be found in all areas of investigation and developed sensitivity. We are not at the end of empirical discovery. We cannot see clearly how to integrate theories about God and spirituality into a context of scientific objectivity.

The development of Metaview is the challenge with which we present ourselves.