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The Pleromatics Project

[Work in progress]

PART I: Defining a new discipline

PART I: Defining a new discipline

Project Overview

Quoting from the Introduction:

Achieving a global understanding, finding the will to address problems, and achieving a oneness of purpose in solving them are at base a spiritual problem. It is essential to mankind's progress to recapture a sense of mankind's meaning in the cosmos, and to develop a sense of collective purpose. We need no less than a new vision of the Whole, and a religion of the Whole.

I propose that we begin by acknowledging that all of the world's spiritual traditions are about the relationship of human beings to one sacred reality which underlies all cosmos. But since historically we have attached allegiences to various different revelations, we must inquire into a method for affirming a central "empirical revelation" which we can then translate and acknowlege as present in each of our own systems. That, in essence, is the whole point of "pleromatics."

Only then may our agenda move to examining how the various traditions relate to the known elements of cosmos. I will suggest generic language for discussing the nature of cosmic unity, but will conclude by examining some of the deeper meanings in the language of the Christian tradition (my own tradition). Though it has dominated the western world for two thousand years, it now stands at a point of krisis, facing the spectre of theology evolving.

Though such an exercise may be quite laudable, we have many overlapping disciplines which already bear in some respect on the problems involved -- metaphysics (ontology), ethics, physics, science of consciousness, theology, comparative religion, psychology. And undoubtedly others which should be mentioned. Why attempt to define yet another one?

Several reasons may be offered:

• Traditional academic disciplines approach their area of interest as an object of study. By contrast, pleromatics is empirical, and must consider subjective experience

• Traditional academic disciplines are reductive in their attitudes toward reality. The quest for synthesis requires a shift of attitude, toward integration of all experience.

• There is a recent tendency, in the enthusiasm for a "new age" of spirituality, toward over-reaction against science and reason. Yet reason and scientific method must be accorded their rightful place in the accumulation of data which then must be integrated systematically. Accumulating and attempting to "integrate" unsound ideas can be destructive of human progress and survival.

• Pleromatics is heavily indebted to analytical (Jungian) psychology. However, Jung himself (a physician and psychiatrist with a long career in clinical practice) continuously emphasized that he wished to avoid metaphysical speculations and he disclaimed expertise as philosopher and theologian. However, pleromatics is specifically concerned with understanding those implications for a new converging/emerging worldview. Pleromatics respects psychological method as a source of "empirical revelation"

• Clarifying the distinctions between the clinical and metaphysical dimensions of Jung's contributions will help strengthen the integrity of analytical psychology as a clinical discipline

• Theology is heavily burdened by fixed attitudes about tradition and orthodoxy. A new and neutrally defined discipline hopefully will provide a new impetus to the integration and synthesis of experience which is (slowly) taking place. It will aid in reinterpreting and finding unifying meaning in traditional symbols. It will create a new relationship between revelatory ("sacred") and natural ("philosophical") theology.

Pleromatics is to be construed as a discipline, that is, a method for integrating understanding. It is not to be understood as a new religion, new "church", or a faith community, or itself a "container" of the experience which it seeks to understand.

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PART I: Defining a new discipline

Definition

Pleromatics: "The search for meaning in the experience of the fullness of reality"

• Search -- The final goal is elusive, not immediately apparent, and the elements of the answer change over time. To search implies awareness of the possibility of something which one does not now hold, something new perhaps, or something which one once had, but lost.

• Meaning -- Consciousness is the essential element for meaning. To find meaning is to find a higher level of consciousness. It is to find significance, perhaps at several levels, beyond superficial appearances. It entails a sense of the significance of existence, of connectedness, of purpose.

• Experience -- That which is neither known, perceived, nor encountered, which is completely unconnected from ourselves in every sense, cannot exist for us. Experience is the necessary connection between reality and meaning. Speculating in the abstract, about that which we have not experienced is worthless. Experience includes perception of physical phenomena, and is the basis for science. But perception does not exist apart from psychological activity. "Inner" experience may not be discounted, for experience of the physical is itself but one aspect of experience of psyche.

• Fullness -- in two senses: (1) that which fills up; and (2) complete in itself

• Reality -- that which is ultimate, most basic, and unfalsefiable; the ground and determinant of all being

Pleromatics is construed as singular (cf. the words ethics, dynamics, etc.)

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PART I: Defining a new discipline

Derivation

From pleroma ["plErwma" - E = eta; w = omega] -- that which fills up [Liddel-Scott Gk-Eng Lexicon], a full measure, fullness, completeness (entirety), plenitude; the full complement (of a ship). From ple-ro-o ["plErow"] -- to fill up, to pervade, to complete.

Pleroma:

In the New Testament
In Gnosticism
In Jung
In Teilhard de Chardin

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PART I: Defining a new discipline

Method

If experience is the necessary bridge between meaning and reality, the method of pleromatics must revolve around taking the measure of experience. The preferred method for measuring the physical world is of course the scientific method. It is serving us well, and has yielded the explosive expansion of knowledge which we have seen in the twentieth century.

But the expansion of knowledge is but one aspect of the expansion of consciousness, and as twentieth century experience shows, does not itself provide an adequate basis for meaningful relationship to the nonlocal reality which science itself now affirms.

The mission of pleromatics is to expand the understanding of the experiences of nonlocal reality (nuocontinuum, pleroma), and devise a method for analysis. It will find itself occupied with the study of deepest psychological experience, including intention, meditation, active imagination, ritual, dream, spontaneous fantasy, visions, and ordinary states of consciousness in ways which go beyond the current limits of the scientific method.

Yet in evaluating its findings, pleromatics must rely on both the rule of reason, and the rule of reasonableness. Certain propositions will have a higher weighting, and any change in them will require a resorting of all subsidiary propositions. Deriving those propositions with their proper weightings must be prior to synthesis. This hierarchy of propositions also defines the agenda for pleromatics.

Our first task is to derive certain principles, which will have the character of constant values running throughout the subsequent inquiry. These will govern the derivation of postulates, which reasonably derive from the principles; thus they are variables, but variables which carry primary weight. The elements of the resulting synthesis will be secondary variables, subject to change upon any revaluation of postulates or principles.

Pleromatics as a field necessarily deals with speculative content. However, by following this schematic method, and constantly recycling through the method of weightings as new information is gathered, its assertions progressively gain strength. The level of uncertainty is thus reduced, but never to zero, in a universe we presently understand to be operating under an "uncertainty principle."

The following outline illustrates how the process might be applied.

Principles (constants):

• reality (hypostasis; substance) of psyche

• primacy of psyche:

  psyche reveals itself in psyche's work
  what psyche reveals is psyche
  what physics reveals as physical is revealed only through psyche
  

• unity of reality: nonlocal reality of physics is same as nonlocal reality of psyche (by definition; if one reality were distinct from another, it would be "local", not nonlocal.)

• distinguishing between physics and psyche does not violate principle of unity

• findings must be confirmed in the collective (not merely personal)

• psyche (nuocontinuum) is the primal, prior reality within which physical creation exists

• psyche = pleroma = collective unconscious = spiritual realm = nuocontinuum

• "God" (Godhead) is [a] name of reality, the ground of all that is

• unity of all things in their origin from one source, and in systems interactiveness

• realm of psyche is as "natural" as the realm of physics, and is ordered. Nonlocal reality is not "supernatural" (or more correctly, supranatural), but it is supratemporal.

• existence is permanent, eternal (for everything which exists has a pleromatic aspect, though of course, a physical arrangement is ephemeral)

• dynamism (Heraclitus: "panta rhei")

• emergence (Bertalanfy, life-systems theory)

• coincidence of opposites, empirically in Jung; also, Jakob Boehme: "In yes and no all things consist"; Hegel

• evolution: if a part evolves so must the whole (Spencer)

• nature of nonlocal reality

• the archetype of wholeness, the impetus for "getting it all together"

• eschatology as change of state of consciousness (end of "time" = end of ordinary consciousness); enantiodromia

• apokalypsis as inflow to ego (consciousness) of self (previously unconscious) contents

• noogenesis and human purpose -- Jung, Teilhard

• the ethical dimension -- living ethics; the ethics of respect for life's own equilibrium (Schweitzer); the transcendent function (Jung) as the central axis of ethical responsibility

Copyright 1997, Donivan Bessinger. All rights reserved. 24 Feb 1997