The Twelfth Insight - James Redfield [12]
When the Protestant Reformation occurred—a direct rejection of Papal authority—the structures of the Medieval world began to completely break down, and with them, the established reality of the people.
Precisely here, I knew, was where the Modern age began. For centuries, the churchmen had dictated a strictly theological purpose for existence and for natural events. And then that picture of life had systematically eroded, leaving humans in a state of deep existential uncertainty, especially concerning their spirituality. If the churchmen, who had always dictated the facts of spiritual reality, were wrong, then what was right?
The optimistic thinkers of that day had a solution. We would follow the model of the ancient Greeks, they said. We would commission Science to go out and investigate this suddenly new world we found ourselves in. And in the enthusiasm of the day, everything was on the table, including our deepest spiritual questions, such as Why are we here? What happens after death? And is there a plan and destiny for humankind?
With this new mandate, Science was sent to look at the world objectively and to report back. Over the centuries it wonderfully mapped the physical realities of nature, from the movement of galaxies and planets to the biology of our bodies, the dynamics of weather systems, and the secrets of food production. But it did not quickly return with an objective analysis of our spiritual situation.
At this crucial point, we made a critical psychological decision. In the absence of existential answers, we decided to turn our attention to something else in the meantime. While we were waiting, we would focus on settling into this new world of ours, devoting ourselves to the betterment of humankind. We abated our uncertainty by striving to make our secular world more abundant and secure.
And that’s what we did, creating in the following centuries the greatest surge in material abundance the world had ever seen. But even as we put our energies to bettering our physical circumstances, waiting as we were for the higher questions to be answered, Science itself was pushing that higher mandate further into the distance.
In fact, as the centuries proceeded, Science began to ponder such questions less and less. In a sense, these inquiries had become a victim of Science’s success in the physical realm. The more it succeeded in explaining the outer world—and created new technologies that increased the population’s level of security—the less important spiritual questions became. Let the religions fight it out over the larger issues, scientists began to think. We’ll stick to the physical world.
By the time the theories of Isaac Newton were filtering through Science, the dismissal was almost complete. Newton established the mathematics that defined the universe as operating strictly on its own, following basic mechanical laws, in a completely predictable manner—like a giant machine. Now, the Universe could be regarded from a completely secular perspective. God didn’t move the stars in the sky. Gravity did.
The Modern, secular, materialistic worldview had been born and, pushed by Science, was exported around the planet. The idea of God, or of a deeper spiritual experience for that matter, now seemed not only unnecessary but unlikely as well. And as for the inner evidence for a spiritual reality—higher states of consciousness, Synchronicity, premonitions and intuitive guidance, Afterlife experiences—these could all be written off as pathological hallucination or religious delusion and removed from the debate completely. Even many religious institutions, suffering from diminished attendance, became ever more oriented toward secular, social activities rather than toward any discussion of real spiritual experience.
And as science and other institutions went, so did the individual. The world seemed so normal and manageable and