Sapientia is the Latin word for “wisdom,” whose root has experiential implications, meaning “to taste.” This word is associated with the wisdom literature of the world, particularly holy books, from which the words sapient and sagacity derive, as well as the words sophomore (educated fool) and sophistry (the use of fallacious arguments). In the Book of Proverbs, wisdom is identified as feminine (Sophia), likewise derived from sapientia. Scientia also has L. roots, meaning “to know” or “knowledge,” from which our word “science” derives. Sapientia, or Gaia, is traditionally associated with the feminine, knowing contextually via experience, and the heart, or intuitive, right-brain knowing. By contrast, Scientia is associated with maleness, formal academic study, selective attention, and the intellect (head) or left-brain knowledge. As the whole cannot be defined by any one part, only both hemispheres working together in harmony can give the clearest, most complete picture of reality as it is.

Ninety-five percent of the human population is left-brain dominant. A 2013 study sampling 160,000 Americans showed that 37% of Americans are left-brained, while only 29% are right-brained. In only 34% of participants did the two hemispheres exert equal influence on decision-making. A person might be in a situation where their left brain (mind, intellect) tells them one thing, and their right brain (intuition, heart) is telling them something else when the dialogue is really happening between brain parts, requiring time and deliberation to process and integrate.

In classical, medieval education, university leaders understood that Fides et Scientia, “faith and knowledge,” left and right brain, are two halves of a fully educated whole and belonged together in a liberal arts curriculum. Head and heart were to be paired like love and marriage, or horse and carriage, in that order. Hence, curricula development pivoted on the holistic principle that reason and understanding were divinely given (a) as a means provided by God to bring students to a true knowledge of same as Source, and (b) in the process, lead persons to a knowledge of themselves as offspring of that Source, so as to lend (c) a better understanding of one’s place in nature and the universe. As any equestrian can tell you, it’s the horse that ultimately finds a hold on the rider and his reins, not the other way around.

The medieval meaning of the word university had as central to its definition “to help a student find his place in the universe.” The two currents, sapientia and scientia (wisdom and science) were understood to link as horse and carriage, or more organically, as vine to branch. Such eventually was to result in unitive consciousness or undivided seeing and knowing. The curriculum consisted of courses aimed at guiding students toward liberating their fettered minds, freeing them from their human foibles, tribal biases, and perceptual quirks in order to see, reason, and communicate more effectively, as taught by Plato in his Academy. The curriculum consisted of seven courses of study, the Trivium (grammar, rhetoric and logic), and Quadrivium (arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music), all preparatory for monastic training in sapientia. Western education emerged from monasteries because monastic life involved the kind of disciplined learning thought to ennoble, leading to the kind of self-perfection that only the liberal arts could lay the groundwork for. Such academic rigor has since gone the way of the buggy whip. In part because that degree of rigor and cloistering is unnecessary for whole-making and, in many instances, may hinder or even pervert it.

Contrast that with modern education (epistemology), particularly from the so-called Age of Enlightenment (15-16th century) to the present, which fragmented knowledge, relocating it in information, facts, and ideas, a primarily cognitive enterprise whose end for many students is to shape a career for purposes more wholly pragmatic than otherwise. Excluded is an emphasis on transrational (spiritual), intuitive, and imaginative means of knowing. Instead, knowledge of the universe (cosmology) was professed (by professors) to be gained wholly via observational data points along exclusive scientific (empirical) lines. Such an empirical-only means of education assumes that what science does not or cannot know via its limited methods doesn’t exist.

Hence, true to left-brain form, vast pools of knowledge and knowing became selectively unattended to (repressed) in the classroom. Subsequently, degrees awarded focused on specialization via divided seeing (dualistic thinking) over undivided knowing (unitive consciousness). This resulted in further dividing science from religion (spirituality), and all disciplines from wisdom, each other, and the whole, thereby separating knowledge from knowing, head from heart, God (wisdom) from creation, and left from right brain.

Lamentably, it also resulted in two universe stories (two cosmologies), one religious, the other scientific. In effect, leaving students and the mass of thinking humanity (including religious) with “two heads beset by double-vision” in explaining the origin of the universe. So much for modern and post-modern education “professing” to teach a comprehensive understanding of the whole by incomplete means. Integrating science and religion cosmologies involves neither a higher degree of intelligence nor a level of creativity beyond what is already known. That the best of scientific and religious scholars slogged into the 21st century still carrying two or more theories of the same observational phenomenon speaks to the inherent prevalence of divided seeing, and the current need to evolve a higher level of consciousness. Along with science and religion, classical and quantum physics remain unreconciled aspects of the same whole and attest to the same schizoid tendency in human perception and thought. As mass and energy are different manifestations of the same thing, so science and wisdom, spirit and matter, spirit and soul are all fundamentally interchangeable phenomena depending on their level of frequency vibration. Said Teilhard, “matter is Spirit slowed down enough for us to see it.”  Likewise in literature, where prose is traditionally distinguished from poetry. Both are forms of communication that use written words. Their fundamental difference is not one of degree but of kind, measured by the level of consciousness (resonant frequency) that employs them. Good prose employs the right words in the right order based on spoken language, as in novels, newspapers, and essays. Good poetry arranges the best words in the best order, using fewer of them. It combines images with musicality and rhythm to convey feeling or meaning in a deeper way, whose next highest level is music. Great prose can only hope to approach good poetry in economy of expression and impact. Likewise, great poetry and music border on the mystical, sublime, and wordless in resonating with the heart.

Save for the human species, do you know of any sub-human creatures with two heads and/or double vision, not so by defect or deformity? (See the author’s recent DTN blog entry on Seeing Double)

Selecting for and placing a cultural premium on exclusive left-brain perception, dominance, and values is a major cause of the world being divided as it is today. Science’s professorial icon and esteemed poster child of our times is Neil de Grasse Tyson, the brilliant left-brained astrophysicist in total eclipse of wisdom, much in demand among talking heads in the entertainment world.

Continuing the horse and carriage analog, note that all forward motion in the carriage derives entirely from the horse, which at all times is out in front of it, providing the energy (horsepower) to draw the carriage toward its destination. When inert, there is no power (movement) in the carriage whatsoever, save that which is derived from the horse when the latter is in motion. Along cosmogenic lines, substitute the word ‘wisdom’ for horse, ‘science’ for carriage, and ‘Omega’ for destination, and reframe the prior two sentence as follows:

There is no power in science per se and evolution, save derived power, as neither can make progress toward a destination (Omega) of their own accord unless something drives or draws them there. As the created order appears to have a built-in, self-organizing component trending toward progressive growth, development, and complexity, one might plausibly conjecture that evolution (history) isn’t so much moving forward by an impetus of its own making (a push).

Rather, it is being drawn (a pull) by a powerfully invisible ebb-tide (cosmic wisdom), innermost and outermost, referenced by Thomas Berry as a “sea of energy beyond all comprehension.” Physics calls that invisible sea of energy the quantum fluctuation of the vacuum, or zero-point energy. Religion calls it God, the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end, kit and caboodle. Consider the following: Both disciplines, science and religion, and both hemispheres, left and right brain, are looking at the SAME energy (fireball) currently in its latter stages converging in more involuted (psychoid), centrated, and refined form in the interior life of spiritually developed humans. Their trysting place is the cosmic crossroads where micro- and macrocosm, the eternal and space-time, religion and science, general relativity and quantum mechanics, left and right-brain, scientia and sapientia, and all polarities collide and reconcile in complexity consciousness. Ironically, it fits DTN Brian Swimme’s definition of God as “the creative resolution of tensions.” Such is the universe becoming aware of itself in one centralized species – homo terrestrian.

In ever coming to us from the future, this cosmic trysting is creating a new phylum of humanity becoming fully conscious of itself by amorization (compassion) along realized psychospiritual lines – the mythic Omega Point (holy grail) of cosmogenic evolution. Assuming the Genesis and Big Bang stories of creation are the SAME story looked at through different lenses (hemispheres), it follows that the end (titrated fire) can be found in the beginning (explosive fire), and vice versa. Along the way, the fiery energy of same merely fuels all personal, evolutionary, and cosmogenic stages and their transformative manifestations. The big picture (Big Story) can only be clearly envisioned, and the New Universe Story told, when all three components are tri-axially aligned, causing them to be an experience (felt sense) in consciousness. Otherwise, a person’s inner deficiency, re: axial misalignment, inevitably results in an utter deficiency of being more wholly aligned (cosmically) resulting in a discord with self, others, and the universe at large. But note, all other discords or misalignments beyond self, begin with self, that which the “know thyself” maxim of the Delphic Oracle, often mouthed by Socrates and Plato, aimed at underscoring with their disciples. Hence, truth-seeking must start from within a person, discovering one’s innate or essential self (original face) along cosmic (spiritual) lines, which only the wisdom literature of the world effectively addresses.

“For where the beginning is, there will the end be. Blessed is he who will take his place in the beginning; he will know the end. For where the beginning is, there will the end be. Blessed is he who will take his place in the beginning; he will know the end and will not experience death. Blessed is he who came into being (eternal body) before he came into being (planetary body)” – Gospel of Thomas (19).

End of Story, the Big Story.

A full millennium before the Age of Enlightenment, when the institutional Church became the religion of the Roman Empire, the shamanic wisdom tradition (Sophia) was suppressed by church authorities, all of whom were male. The inner experience of the shamanic tradition became thwarted, severed, and inverted in favor of the conceptual mind and church doctrine, ushering in the Dark Ages. Eventually, sapientia humana (human wisdom) replaced sapientia divina (divine wisdom) in formal education, situating the cart before the horse whereby only one, totally materialistic universe story emerged that prevails today. In short, it began to produce sophomoric thinkers taught by malnourished professors unable to impart full-orbed integral nourishment in the classroom. As in modern journalism, the cotton candy of personal subjectivity and fragmented half-truths became substituted for the honest pursuit of substantive integral research and knowing. Hubris replaced humility, open-mindedness, and intellectual honesty, while shared ignorance subbed for spiritual objectivity (wisdom). Such broadened the meaning of the word “sophomoric” to now include faculty, giving students the curricula they wanted, as opposed to what they needed in learning how to see and think clearly. This sad state of affairs goes beyond reversing horse and cart. “Neigh,” it eliminates the horse altogether, the invisible power WITHIN and IN FRONT of all organic growth, personal development, and cosmogenic evolution.

Truth be told, the left brain and the small self it gives rise to (ego) is hermetic, excluding most everything not in its narrow purview. Known as the “false self” or “carnal mind,” the small self personifies the axiom: “The less you know, the more you think you know.” In creating a fiction of its own superiority, the left brain takes in about 3 degrees of what’s fully there to see and know on the broad bandwidth of creation. Like a wide-eyed child in a candy store, it skims the surface, browsing on what looks, sounds, and tastes good, with little regard for whether it actually IS good and sound or in good taste. In turn, the senses serve the intellect of His Majesty, the Imperial Ego, further suppressing the right brain, which takes in the other 357 degrees of what’s there, in vain begging for an audience before the royal imposter. Prior to inversion, the right brain is the sacred temple housing Spirit (Sophia), while the left brain is the observational tower, recognizing the same, protecting and defending her, tending to her voice, wants, and needs as the keeper, nurturer, and giver of life. Such inversions are considered Satanic by the wisdom traditions, Satan being the one who reverses and negates the divine order, turning it upside down. In the wisdom tradition, inversion is a perversion of eternal truths. Instead, the right brain is left standing on tiptoe, pleading, “May I have your attention, please?” Despite its many pleas, the ego’s first- and second-line defenses (led by denial and repression) protect the ego’s superiority complex, disallowing Sophia an audience with same. And this, even though the right brain sees more, understands more, and overall is more sensitive and intelligent. Perceiving more widely when given free rein, the exiled right brain is actually designed to be the Master Overseer. But as the saying goes, a prophet(ess) (wisdom teacher) is not without honor save in his/her own hometown (unconscious mind), and before left-brain dominance or patriarchy. Like Cinderella, the right brain (Sophia) is forced to stay home under lock and key scrubbing floors, while her mother (Theologia) and two sibs (Scientia and Academia) perennially attend the royal ball of “higher learning.” And the rest, literally, has been our educational history for the past 500 years.

[On the subject of children’s classics as archetypal, in the movie version of Wizard of Oz, producer Victor Fleming had to constantly upbraid Jack Haley (Tin Man), Burt Lahr (Lion), and Ray Bolger (Scarecrow) for repeatedly “hamming it up” in efforts to upstage Judy Garland (Dorothy) in the film’s many scenes involving the fabled foursome. Ironicly, in that fairy tales, cultural mythology, and wisdom literature often depict the hero/heroine emerging from the ranks of the lowly, downtrodden, or least expected station in life. In the gospels, women and children are characterized by the Christ figure as being “closer to the kingdom of God” than egoic, left-brain male climbers, who inveterately scratch and claw their way into the limelight, the chief seats and top billing in most human endeavors, including in political, religious, and educational circles.]

Such is a consistent theme in the wisdom/spiritual traditions of most cultures. That is, divinity (higher truth) is always found where least expected, which is why, in developing a mythical Big Story, one best look for it there, in the most subtle, overlooked, pedestrian, unobtrusive element(s) present everywhere and in all things. Hint: In not heeding this principle while pursuing a unified field theory, Albert Einstein had regrets bypassing this common phenomenon as key to solving the unified enigma, while Nikola Tesla did not, making it his lifelong focus. Question: What is that universal element (constant)? Einstein won the Nobel Prize for his work in general relativity, whereas, in keeping with classic irony, Tesla died in obscurity, penniless and alone in a seedy hotel room. His documents on naming the rudiments of this mystery and its practical application to everyday life were confiscated by the FBI, where they remain classified to this day. Considered eccentric, even mad, Tesla’s potential contributions to the future were ignored. Even his innovations in use at the present time remain unacknowledged by history books. As Tesla predicted prior to his death in 1943, the 21st century would be his like no other, and for reasons just now being disclosed. (see The Lost Century, produced by Steven Greer, Amazon Prime). Those who are seen dancing are often deemed insane by those who cannot hear the music.

The left brain is a reducing valve, often settling for simple answers and half-truths, taking the shortest, least resistant path between any two points. Result? Queen Wisdom (Sophia) is displaced by a data-collecting laboratory functionary. Like a gum-shoe reporter in the golden age of journalism (now extinct), the right brain is forever in selfless pursuit of the big picture and the whole story. She specializes in serving the interconnecting/interbeing nexus of the whole, the deeper fabric of who we are that joins all things universally and in which they (and we) consist in an elemental way.

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of all ages: Introducing Sophia, evolution’s rising star waiting in the wings, soon to burst on the scene, replacing intellect in leading the vanguard toward Omega. Plz give a warm welcome to Sophia, the innate emissary from beyond-within folk, and with an archetypal “Over the Rainbow” song of her own to bring down the Big Story house. Within her treasure house, consonant with timely fluctuations of the vacuum state whose vibrations inform the material realm we all dwell in (says science), there resides a hidden manna (Spirit, insists Sophia), a source of infinite supply that is not dependent on academic curricula, intellect, and sense-bound empirical knowledge, nor on any “man, whose breath is in his nostrils, of what account is he?” (Isa. 2:22). Neither is she dependent on the goodwill of others, who by history have consistently shown her the cold shoulder of censorship, indifference, or neglect. Quietly biding her time, patiently awaiting her moment, she knows that mature wisdom comes from her invisible, right-brain abode in exalted moments, receiving new and fresh inspirations and innovations via the outpouring of light therefrom. Ask any mystic, artist, innovator, or musician of noteworthy of their name. Or better yet, observe any awe-inspired child enthralled about a new discovery and eager to learn more.

By history, the discrimination and censoring of wisdom (the feminine) in politics, religion, business, and education parallels the standing of women globally or in a given culture and conversely. Likewise, the feminine, as an integral component in views of divinity, nowadays, is becoming more accepted as androgynous (or feminine) in nature, given equal billing in most world religions. From Athena to Zeuxippe, the goddess of 10,000 names is finally becoming understood as One and undivided in a universal androgyne motif. Not only were all the pre-Abrahamic deities women, but for 700 years, the Church went left-brain patriarchal until Sophia’s long-suppressed creative energy rose like a Phoenix from the ashes, blossoming in the Renaissance era. Prior and in-between, such mystery religions went underground, deemed heretical by institutional religion and the dark side of patriarchal rule. Mystics became the heretics of the Church. Many of them were women condemned as such, labeled demon-possessed, and/or burned at the stake as witches. Until it became the religion of the empire (politics), early converts in the Jesus Movement also had to go underground, literally hiding beneath the streets in catacombs to practice their communal faith. Radically unorthodox to the religion of his culture and time, many of the principles Jesus taught derived from the “heretical” teachings of Sophia, exiled in these underground mystery religions and wisdom traditions. The mystery religions well understood the entropy (decay) that sets in, and the nightmarish dangers that arise from mind (intellect) separated from Sophia (wisdom).

.  .  . “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians. 2:3).

At one time, there was a mystical science tradition that today needs to be regained, nurtured by the ancient universal energy field (noospheric aura) hovering above the planet like a hen over her brood in readiness to gather her inhabitants as one in unitive consciousness. Said tradition pivoted on the wisdom tradition that survived outside the institutional church, begun in England in 1620 by the Royal Society for the Study of Science. Censored and destroyed by the Roman Church and Hapsburgs at its inception, it consisted of scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and mystics whose goal was to teach wholeness, cultivating the mathematical and mystical mind. The censoring of same laid the groundwork for the Enlightenment Age, where rationalism (left-brain preeminence) reached its peak, and became more fixed and materialistic in views of the universe and nature, continuing on into the present. Thwarted by the conceptual mind of our times, a vestigial holdover from the past, the major resistances to developing an all-inclusive Spirit-Science synthesis are apt to arise from authorities in the scientific-medical-academic “Vatican” of today, the truth-suppressing equivalent of the military-industrial complex in goal and purpose.

As for the “noospheric aura” (electromagnetic jacket) hovering over the planet, some futurists believe that when the number of planetary souls reach critical mass in their axial receptivity to same, a corresponding degree of the aura’s consciousness will flow (download) into the planet, anchoring it to same in a more global healing and whole-making way. Such truth will make Earth free of its calculating, self-destructive ways, but not before things get worse, having the effect of bending the will and desire of the Earth’s inhabitants toward this all-encompassing wisdom energy (Spirit) like no other time in its history. The arc of truth bends ever so slowly but always in the direction of setting free the encumbered truths Sophia (wisdom).

Meanwhile, Sophia stands in readiness to be called on by earnest seekers, activated not so much by reading books about her but realized in experience via contemplative and devotional practices. Most of these practices occur in the liminal stillness and silence between and beyond words and thoughts, in a realized state of I-AM-ness. Such is the sacred inner vacuum and liminal trysting place for wisdom, creating a ‘Thou art I’ and ‘I am Thou’ felt sense of Oneness, the threshold of undivided seeing and thinking in wholes. No law of mind or matter can touch unitive consciousness (Oneness) for clarity of vision, the optimal observational point in seeing and composing the Big Story. Such is Wisdom’s way, the road less traveled far removed from beaten empirical paths, the lonely wilderness trail of the intuitively inspired poets, playwrights, prophets, innovators, and seers. For with childlike wonder and curiosity, its the poet seer who forever searches for the broader and deeper reality, the unifying awareness that frees consciousness and community from the divisiveness and confines of empirical knowledge, egocentricity, and clan toward unity in diversity. Poet seers are uncommonly aware of the broader band of reality beyond the range of limited perception, often knowing and explaining things without knowing how they know them. These wisdom thinkers are marked by full-access knowing, involving an acute awareness that is rational, transrational, intuitive, and imaginative all at once, combined with the uncanny ability to analyze and synthesize in equal measure.

The secrets of the universe are seldom disclosed to the kind of thinking selected for and valued in today’s classroom and laboratory. Most creative ideas come through implanted knowing, a distinctive awareness that is present to what is, just as it is, before the thinking mind contaminates the liminal field by labeling, interpreting, categorizing, and judging things. Wisdom knowing is deeper, more holistic, immediate, and direct than knowledge. It is out of such rare, inspired mind-sets that visions of a new, all-inclusive, future-looking universe story will emerge.

“The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers – creative and holistic “right-brain thinkers” (Daniel Pink, author) A third universe story? Unnecessary, opines this author, as the two we already have, scientia and sapientia, can be properly brokered and synthesized as One. But only in Sophia’s wheelhouse, a state of next-level unitive consciousness with Wisdom at the helm in synthesizing them. Meaning that the two we have now (religious and scientific) are ALREADY one, joined by a common universal element awaiting discovery and identification. The failure to envision same is owing to impaired vision (dualistic thought) that sees double, viewing the original as separate (divided) for lack of left and right brain, left and right eye coordination, and cooperation, which corrected would allow them to be seen as unified. There simply cannot be two Mona Lisas (da Vinci) or two Starry Nights (van Gogh), save for replicas and counterfeits or a visual impairment that misperceives each masterpiece as two and divided.

While science remains hamstrung by its own research methodology, wisdom sees more clearly in depth, dimension and with penetrating insights. A gathering force by nature, wisdom causes all else to fall into its proper place and order, like horse and buggy. Very few ever see the world clearly and steadily for want of doing same. Sophia goes away when the mind attempts to behold this wisdom through intellectual eyes alone since the intellect is not allowed to go there, but the heart. Its the heart that knows, and knows deeply, assisting the intellect to understand its primary truths and ways. With regard to higher (deeper) truths, the intellect is to settle into its deeper function as an avenue of same only. Again, wisdom (spirituality) is foremost about seeing, cleansing the lens by removing visual (egoic) obstructions along the way. When there’s no spiritual light, there can be no holistic sight and no horse sense to keep one from betting on unenlightened scientists, academicians, and theologians for clear direction and insight into the deeper secrets of creation.

“One could say that the whole of life lies in seeing – if not ultimately, at least essentially” (Teilhard de Chardin).

As novice to master, science (natural revelation) has nothing to teach wisdom (special revelation), the latter being the former in more mature, higher-order form. In organic evolution, it’s the blossom that rightly precedes the fruit in development, its penultimate (next to last) stage before fruit bearing (wisdom); in ascending order having followed root, stem, branch and leaf accordingly. Ditto the evolving noosphere (planetary mind), which in Teilhard’s model is likewise the step prior to the pneumatosphere (theosis) in cosmogenic evolution.

Pneuma (meaning ‘air’) being the Greek word for “Spirit,” is commonly used in NT Scripture. Recall, in Teilhard’s schema cosmogenic evolution is christogenic (pan-christic) throughout. As such, it must be so in both origin (Alpha) and destiny (Omega). That is, on the evolutionary journey, personal and collective, Spirit (wisdom) is to mind (intellect), what horse is to carriage, the I-AM-ness of it all, with divinity (Spirit) its Alpha and Omega, first and last, beginning and end invisibly orchestrating (drawing) the entire circuitous cosmic dance to Itself (Rev.22:13). We have everything to learn from the ancients along Socratic, Platonic, and Vedic lines, and save for Christ, nothing to learn from anyone since.

“For one to fly, one needs only to take the reins, the horse will take you the rest of the way” (Melissa James).

It’s ironic that most of those who participated in the scientific revolution (1543-1687), whose contributions seem (to us) so original and innovative, were themselves convinced that they were merely rediscovering this vast ocean of knowledge, the prisca sapientia (pristine knowledge) that had been possessed by the ancients but was somehow lost along the way.

Should they remain self-satisfied as dualistic thinkers, with sheepskins and pedigrees born of separation consciousness (divided thinking), academics, theologians, and scientists shall not inherit the wisdom of the ages, nor will they be initiated into the deepest mysteries of creation and evolution. That is particularly so with regard to the “mother of all cosmological riddles,” naming the universal energy that religions call “God,” physics calls the vacuum state (zero-point energy), and Indigenous cultures worldwide have known for millennia as the “Great Spirit.”

The Deeptime Network (DTN), a synergy group consisting of gifted members in all fields worldwide orchestrated by Jennifer Morgan, appears to be on course toward an integral understanding of this cosmic mystery and, with it, the New Universe Story. The scholarly work of Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker continues to evolve in the true spirit of investigative wonder, posing more questions than answers, offered with more open-minded humility than certainty. Swimme admittedly has approached a transitional (investigative) crossroads, the cosmogenic junction which may sooner require closer encounters of the sapiential kind, one promising to disclose richer treasures than those once held sacrosanct as the rainbow’s end (mathematical cosmology). Swimme’s journey, a winding and checkered one, may sooner uncover an energy of an altogether different kind, the cosmic rip-tide that’s been out front inspiring his creative efforts all along, drawing him and the empirical sciences into “the sea of energy beyond all comprehension” that Thomas Berry referenced, one that lies just beyond the threshold of “the wisdom phase of modern science” that Berry knew all wisdom initiates must cross. While Swimme has defined God as “the creative resolution of all tensions,” it appears his future-looking challenge, and that of the DTN community is to create the kind of cosmogenic model that reconciles the age-old Spirit-Science tensions that his insightful statement implies. And to do so by identifying the unifying force that joins them all. Berry, who along with Teilhard de Chardin, Matthew Fox, and Richard Rohr, have all been inspired by a deeper foray into this sapiential mystery, leaving it for those who follow to name the invisible energy (“horsepower”) fueling the carousel of evolution. For said energy embeds in them and in all things, drawing them to Itself and into the grand ocean of interbeing secrets, combining exoteric knowledge (science) with esoteric knowing (wisdom). For on both personal and collective (cosmogenic) journeys, the latter must eventually replace the former in the evolution of thought, as butterfly morphs to caterpillar, and blossom to fruit.

…“in whom all things consist and hold together” (Colossians 3:16).

Truth lies in a well, whose darkened shaft, far beyond empirical horizons, is lighted by lux sapientia, the “wisdom light” of old shining forth from Sophia’s lamp. Scientia is merely its hardware and wick (cognitive form) that carries and releases its software (Spirit), a formless flame that makes all things incandescent and neither flickers nor dies. Only its primordial illuminations can create the kind of unitive consciousness (undivided seeing) and sacred knowing that reveals hidden mysteries kept secret from the foundation of the world.

“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths, ask where the good way is, and walk in it and you will find rest for your souls. But you said, ‘We will not walk in it” (Jeremiah 6:16).

In the Hebraic wisdom tradition, the Book of Proverbs (1:7) begins with an admonition to put things in their proper order: love before marriage, horse before carriage, wisdom before intellect. Such elevates sapientia over scientia, the latter being its schoolmaster in a transformative evolutionary process, individual and cosmic. Upon having one’s fill in the empirical sciences, coming down the home stretch of the journey, sapientia (Sophia) must take the inside track, holding the lead in the place of priority on the quest in ourselves, our relationships, and sundry vocations. The higher knowledge (undivided knowing) will bring forth the added things necessary to complete the narrative and its magnum opus, the capstone on Teilhard’s mythical Big Story pyramid (cone), and the fulfillment of his long-awaited Omega Point vision.

“Sophia cries aloud in the street (unheard), in the markets she raises her voice, at the entrance of the city. She asks, “How long, Oh simple ones, will you love being simple. And how long will fools hate knowledge? (Prov. 1:20-33).

Prima veritas (the first truth) does not call on mankind from afar to believe in it nor to substitute empirical knowledge for same. In physics, general relativity differs from special relativity. Likewise, natural revelation (science) is not the same as special revelation (wisdom). It does not call upon mankind from afar to believe in it, nor to substitute empirical knowledge for same. Primarily a second half of life awakening, divine Spirit dwells within persons, drawing them to itself on the journey from the visible (explicate order) to the invisible (implicate order) as Source, kindling not only love but glimpses of a unitive truth reserved only for her initiates. Such draws the intellect to Itself, anchoring it to the earth toward the highest perfection and pursuits her recipients can enjoy in this world. This indwelling gives the kind of instruction by which the mind/intellect bursts forth in spiritual affection, a state in newness of self, perception, and thought orienting to an experiential fund of knowledge and truth ordinarily unseen and unheard. This wisdom (sapientia divina) and understanding come neither from academic curricula nor approved learning, but from above, upon first suffering divine things that greatly diminish ego and the empirical knowledge of this world (sapientia humana). As above, so below, innermost and outermost.

Earth is in peril, and the time is short. As light bearers and light workers, those at DTN and in other synergy groups worldwide must lead the transformative charge toward the next (wisdom) cosmogenic level. The remainder of the path to same is informed by implanted knowing, lighted by Sophia.

“But the anointing you have received from him abides in you, and you need not that any man should teach you” (1 John 2:27).

Teilhard de Chardin SJ and Thomas Berry PhD were both ordained priests from the same religious tradition, and both were schooled in Jesuitical principles. Both had broader views of how divinity plays out in consciousness, thought, and cosmogenic evolution, well beyond their early Catholic upbringing and education. While pondering same, consider which foundation the remaining cosmogenic super-structure, the divinized (christogenic) apex of its evolving cosmogenic cone (Teilhard’s words) is to be capped, how, and when? And from what body of wisdom? As for when the future is now. As for how, all that remains is to define the organic nature of Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance,” Teilhard’s “ultraphysics,” and Berry’s “sea of incomprehensible energy,” giving a more integral scientific definition to “the wisdom phase of science,” the next cosmogenic frontier as defined by Swimme’s mentor Thomas Berry. For wisdom is but science squared, taken to the next highest vibratory level(s) in human consciousness and cosmogenic evolution. The chemical composition of water is H2O the world over, no matter the word used for it or the language from which it derives. What, then, is that universal element (singularity) in which all things consist, embed, cohere, live, move, and have their being that science calls entanglement, and religion calls God or Spirit (Oneness)?

Having eluded many a questing knight for want of integral worthiness (penetrating wisdom), such is the Holy Grail of understanding, or TOE (Theory of Everything). Heroine Dorothy (Sophia) may sooner appear along with her three fabled friends in a carriage (scientia) drawn by the storied “horse of a different color” (sapientia) into the Emerald City of Oz (Omega), including an audience with the Wizard. And when arranged, in that moment, for the first time, all will know that (a) it had been the mythic mare (wisdom) out in front leading them beyond the rainbow to their journey’s end all along, and (b) the Wizard is but an archetypal image of God, whose referent (energy) was not to be found separate from themselves, but lay WITHIN and AHEAD, giving each what they lacked that only the journey could give them in due time.

“Behold, I am doing a new thing. Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert” (Isa. 43:19).
 [view the link below for a real-time experience in OZ, led by the “mythical mare” of a different color]

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Joe Masterleo, LCSW, DCSW is a clinical social worker in private practice in Syracuse, NY. His nearly half-century of service as a therapist in the mental health care field includes faith-based counseling, with a specialty in integrating psychology and spirituality. His vast clinical experience and rich knowledge base are augmented and informed by Integral Theology and Creation Spirituality. His articles, columns and commentaries on various subjects, including sports, have been published in local newspapers and magazines. Currently, his practice is listed on the Psychology Today website in Syracuse, NY. More detailed information as to the nature and scope of his practice, areas of expertise and types of service provided by contacting Joe at jmasterleo@hotmail.com. Visit his website here.