The Cosmic Spirit: Awakenings at the Heart of All Religions, the Earth, and the Multiverse

As the title suggests, Roland Faber's Cosmic Spirit covers the universe of religious experience with a bold, provocative expansiveness, aided and abetted by his comprehension of Alfred North Whitehead's process theology, and reinforced by post-structuralists such as Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. This rich use of process theology may be expected, as Faber is the Kilsby Family/John B. Cobb Jr. Professor of Process Studies at Claremont School of Theology. If you are unfamiliar or uncertain about Whitehead's process theology, Faber's The Becoming of God: Process Theology, Philosophy, and Multireligious Engagement (2017) serves as a cogent introduction, both to Whitehead and to Faber's post-structuralist articulations of process philosophy and theopoetics. Both books also make the case for Whitehead's vital relevance as a resource for understanding and engaging progressively with our Anthropocene and Pandemic political and ecological anomie, chaos, and violence, grounding in our realities the abstractions of the Cosmic Spirit, his invocations of the archetypes of world religions, and the ideals of a peaceful, loving world.What provoked Whitehead's development of process theology in the years following the First World War was, in large part, his dissatisfaction with the state of science, philosophy, and religion. For Whitehead, they did not illuminate or deal adequately or effectively with the challenges of modernity, of a dynamic progressing world, especially in the wake of WWI, where he lost a son. Newtonian science needed the supplements of quantum physics and relativity; analytic philosophy and logical positivism offered limited, circumscribed outcomes; and religion suffered from sectarianism on the one hand and inert secularism and the “Death of God” on the other. Modern society was in a state of dynamic becoming, but becoming what? The approach of the Depression and the Second World War further dramatized the need for new paradigms of analysis and evaluation, fresh answers to Faber's question, “Why are we here—here, in time and space, on this continent, at this time, on this earth, in this cosmos?” (8).The relevance of that question to our own challenges suggests the relevance of Whitehead to our historical moment on stage, with stage and staging key terms in The Cosmic Spirit. Progressive interventions should emerge from the better evaluations offered by a more expansive critique available from process thought; from its evolved, more potent forms of science, philosophy, and religion. These would improve attunement to the harmonies and intensities of experience, especially in those historical moments when we are prone to ponder political and climate chaos, violence, and injustice. Faber cites Whitehead's portrait of God as “the poet of the world, with tender patience leading it by his vision of truth, beauty, and goodness” (7). In this theopoetic world-wide web of connection, we become “the poets of our spirit of life.” With sufficient attunement, “we are bound to encounter the ‘spirit’ of this contingent life. Then, we become liberated to become ‘poets’ of this spirit” (8), an aesthetic diction and dimension crucial to process theology.Faber offers a number of definitions of the cosmic Spirit, with a varying emphasis on aesthetic and ethical dimensions, on ecumenical transreligiosity and specific beliefs, on its manifold encompassment of an expanding universe—or multiverse—and on our modes of connection to that Spirit, for example, through intuition or moral praxis—doing kind things. An early definition: “The cosmic Spirit of life is, well, cosmic, universal. It is not owned by any religion. Its reality appears in all religions—for instance, as the dynamic and creative presence of God in the Hebrew Scriptures; as the Spirit of pure life in the New Testament; as the Great Spirit of indigenous American tribes; as brahman, the essence of Reality in Hinduism. All of these religions mean the vivid Spirit inherent in all existence and in us” (11). Whether this seems an inspired synthesis or a bland reductionism may depend on the flexibility of the reader's transreligious temperament. Faber continues, “It is in this recognition that the cosmic Spirit stretches us to be released beyond any splintering differences and limiting boundaries. In the excess of the cosmic Spirit, we should measure ‘its’ gift of life only by the intensity by which we give ourselves to others” (11). Again, do kind things, and “become what we are—spirit seekers, poets of our life on a world and in a cosmos that is moved by the process of becoming spiritualized” (11).The book's opening segment, “Why You Should Read This Book,” evokes its tone, scope, and ambitions: “Is there a cosmic Spirit that wants us to awaken to a consciousness of universal meaning and sacred purpose, of freedom of diversity and mutual friendship with all beings, of deep insight into the divine nature of existence and to the hope for a future in which a universe will communicate in peace?” (xi). He answers, offering “a spirituality of the numinous in our relation to the elements of the earth in the matrix of a multiverse by taking you on a journey through the nine paths and nineteen meditations of awakening” (xi).These nine paths and nineteen meditations form the heart and substance of The Cosmic Spirit. The nine paths are archetypes, patterns and contexts for transreligious awakenings, proven ways of seeking an experience of the numinous while overcoming “the slumber of heedlessness” brought on by modernity's anesthetics of secular materialism or narrow sectarianism (15). Each of the nine paths offers a synthesis of relevant practices, scripture, and references from the world's religions as well as meditations from the nineteen “Awakenings,” traditional contemplative practices as well as some created by Faber, meant to provoke engagement and intuition of the cosmic Spirit. The paths are paired: Space and Time, Ocean and Outer Space, Flow of the River and Permanence of the Mountain, Fullness of Forests and Emptiness of the Desert. The ninth dwells on our human perspective, the Staging of our co-creation.For readers, some paths may be more congenial than others, but all hold the potential for “dark, disintegrative connotations within these spiritual universes . . . the sheer unimaginable weight of repeated extinctions of, on, and pointed against the earth as well as its cosmological ubiquity” (299). The burden is on humanity or societies as co-creators of the world we live in to find redemptive extensions of these paths. Faber asks us to “look again” for “an always already sensed . . . unexplored potential of the nine paths, the elements they invoke, and the numinous character of the spiritual Earth that they convey to our human level of understanding, and by way of which they implicate us in their actions, that they themselves harbor the nucleus of these forces of extinction” (299–300), forces we might tap into and re-direct.After a lyrical synthesis of the nine paths—“Fires burn, waters drown, saltwater and the desert parch . . . suns burn, stars explode”—Faber ponders “the Spirit of the Earth in the multiverse”: “If there is a cosmic Spirit—Earth being one nucleus in the matrix of this spiritual cosmos—it is this Spirit that weaves the elements of destruction into elementary forces of life” (300). Embracing “Whitehead's process view—the rhythmical revolutions between outside and inside, perception and creativity, analysis and synthesis” (312), allows us to more readily engage Faber's expansive world-wide web and Spirit.His closing sentences suggest the unity of paradoxes: “In the end, beginning—Spirit; in the beginning, end—cosmos. In the impermanent fragility of their togetherness—Earth. Oscillation. Rhythm. In-differentiation. In-sistence. Polyphilia” (319).In The Cosmic Spirit, Faber's writing often rises to the level of his transreligious convictions, evoking his vision of an intensely spiritualized creation and multiverse. Engaging with this provocative work challenges the scope and adequacy of our own theopoetic vision and responses to the destructive and creative forces of our world, our valuations, and actions.In the meantime, do kind things.