generosity. Thus to have a spiritual experience is to hold sustained feelings of a particular kind dominated by some variant of joy, however serene. The center of mass of the feelings I call spiritual is located at an intersection of experiences: Sheer beauty is one. The other is anticipation of actions conducted in ‘a temper of peace’ and with ‘a preponderance of loving affections.’ These experiences can reverberate and become self-sustaining for brief periods of time. Conceived in this manner, the spiritual is an index of the organizing scheme behind a life that is well balanced, well-tempered, and well-intended. One might venture that perhaps the spiritual is a partial revelation of the ongoing impulse behind life in some state of perfection. If feelings testify to the state of the life process, spiritual feelings dig beneath that testimony, deeper into the substance of living. They form the basis for an intuition of the life process.10
It is the life process, the encounter with Being itself, that is becoming the focus for human spirituality and ethics today. Traditional religious explanations for the mystery of life, which were entirely understandable in their time, projected the significance of life beyond itself to a supernatural self-existent reality that was believed to have called life into existence and upon whom life was permanently dependent. This binary theory of reality inevitably downgraded the significance of the world itself, because it was held to be a rival to its creator; and it projected the credit for humanity’s best discoveries and insights onto this imagined distant authority. Christianity, without entirely understanding what it was doing, tried to balance the record by claiming that God in Christ had become immanent in the world, and had embedded himself in human nature. At the same time, it tried to retain the traditional idea that God was also entirely separated from and transcendent to the world. This is the basis for its claim that Jesus Christ was completely man and completely God at the same time. Contemporary secular spirituality finishes the process that was begun in Christian theology, by severing humanity from its dependence on a supposed external supernatural authority. We seem to be living through a time in which one part of humanity is beginning to claim autonomy or self-governance for itself and to acknowledge that meaning now has to be discovered in the life process itself. We may be no closer to understanding why there is a world, but we are now able to accept the fact that the world itself is the source of the values and meanings we prize most, not some hypothetical transcendent reality which did none of the work yet claims all the credit. One way to express this is to say that the spirit is now engendered by and encountered in the world in which we find ourselves. Rather than positing an external force to account for our most cherished experiences, we begin to understand how they were generated within us in response to the life process itself. And it is through us that the universe has become aware of this. This is mystery enough to be going on with, without hanging on to ancient hypotheses that now create more problems for us than they solve.
Intrigued by the strangeness of it all
But after six uncomfortable hours in the chair, I need more than another coffee break; I need something to take my mind off the dizzy contemplation of the mystery of Being. By nine o’clock in the morning I am being stunned by the serious weirdness of the universe. I once asked a couple of distinguished scientists what was happening before the Big Bang. That, they said, was the $64,000 question no one could answer, though it did not stop people from trying. The fact of the universe, of why there is something and not just nothing, is puzzling enough; what is even more baffling is that through us the universe is now asking questions about itself. One wit inverted that way of putting it, by saying that a physicist is the atom’s way of thinking about atoms. We have not yet encountered other conscious agents in the universe capable of generating questions about their own meaning and the nature of the reality in which they find themselves, but given the vast scale of the universe it is likely that they are out there somewhere. Astronomers tell us that there may be as many as 140 billion galaxies in the visible universe. Bill Bryson offers an analogy to help us get our minds round that unimaginable number. He suggests that if galaxies were frozen peas there would be enough of them to fill the Royal Albert Hall.11
Apart from its impossible vastness, the more we think about it, the more weird our knowledge of the universe and our place within it becomes. Our mathematicians, those prodigies who inhabit a sphere of pure reason, do their calculations and, years later, we discover that the discernible processes of the universe correspond exactly to their mental equations. That the human mind can put us in touch with the intricate structure of the universe is intriguing enough; the emergence of humanity itself is an even more tantalising story. The fact that after 15 billion years our planet became a home for self-conscious beings is worth meditating on, though I am not sure where it gets us. Scientists tell us that our emergence into conscious life is the consequence of certain finely tuned elements called anthropic balances. If the earth were a little closer to the sun it would be too hot for life and if it were a little further away it would be too cold. If the orbit of the earth were slightly different then life on earth would never have emerged. It is the precise balance of two great forces that creates the right conditions for life to exist. The expansive force of the Big Bang spreads the universe out, while the contractive force of gravity pulls it back together. If the gravitational force were too high, the universe would appear, but in a microsecond gravity would pull everything back into a Big Crunch. If the expansion rate were too high, then the universe would stretch at such a rate that gravity would be unable to form the stars and galaxies from whose dust carbon-based life evolved. The chances of these conditions being precisely satisfied are as likely as those of shooting at a target an inch square on the other side of the universe and hitting it. These delicate adjustments do not only refer to the earliest instance, but to the continuing history of the world and its detailed processes.
This extraordinary fine tuning appears to be necessary at every stage of world development. So it is no surprise that religious thinkers point to these anthropic balances as new and compelling evidence for an element of cosmic design. We have already seen that one of the traditional arguments for God was the argument from the appearance of design in nature to the existence of a transcendent designer. We have also been cautioned by the way science has consistently overtaken these hypotheses that posited the existence of an external creation agency and shown us how the life process explains itself from within. That will almost certainly happen with the fine tuning of the universe and the anthropic balances, as well. Scientists already offer a number of ways of explaining them without reference to an external engineer, including the possibility of multiple universes in time/space. Martin Rees believes that there may be an infinite number of universes and that we simply exist in one that combines things in a way that enables us to exist. He offers the analogy of a clothing store: ‘If there is a large stock of clothing, you’re not surprised to find a suit that fits. If there are many universes, each governed by a differing set of numbers, there will be one where there is a particular set of numbers suitable to life. We are in that one.’12
But what about the fact of the existence of the life process itself? If we take it simply as it is in itself without reference to any supernatural originating agency, what kind of reality is the huge, many-sided fact of Being? If what we already know about the universe is anything to go by, the answer may not be to our liking. That’s certainly what the poet Robinson Jeffers suggests in his poem ‘The Great Explosion’:
The universe expands and contracts like a great heart.
It is expanding, the farthest nebulae
Rush with the speed of light into empty space.
It will contract, the immense navies of stars and
galaxies, dust-clouds and nebulae
Are recalled home, they crush against each other
in one harbor, they stick in one lump
And then explode it, nothing can hold them
down; there is no way to express that explosion; all that exists
Roars into flame, the tortured fragments rush away
