My intention for this post is to lay out concisely and from a relatively nonreligious perspective what I see to be the core meaning of the book. I hope that some of you may find it helpful.
Consciousness
At the center of everything is the mystery of consciousness. This is something we all experience; without it we are unaware that we even exist. Despite the immense progress science has made at understanding how the world works, it has not explained subjective consciousness. Evidence is piling up that our complex human awareness cannot be separated from our physical bodies, but how our physical neurology results in the experience of subjective awareness remains a mystery.
The only way I have been able to make sense of this is to see consciousness as being at least as fundamental to reality as physical matter. I see all physical things—all things with physical exteriors, from quantum particles to galaxies to living beings—as having conscious interiors. That is, I see physical form and consciousness as two inseparable aspects of physical reality. This is a philosophical perspective known as Panpsychism. It is very old but has also appealed to many serious thinkers in the modern age. Check out this article in Wikipedia or this video from TED.
As physical exteriors (bodies for us humans) evolve to be more differentiated, autonomous, and complex, their conscious interiors also become more differentiated, autonomous, and complex. At the most basic physical level, all things are united in a fundamental state or “field” of consciousness, which I refer to as universal primal consciousness. This is the transcendent state of awareness sometimes experienced in deep meditation or other altered states of consciousness. As beings evolve, they remain embedded in this simple, universal consciousness, but they also develop more complex structures of consciousness within themselves and in relationship with other things. Just as there are many layers of physical things—for example, quantum particles, atoms, molecules, cells, animals, families, societies, ecosystems, planets—so each level also has its own forms and patterns of consciousness while remaining connected within the original, enduring, primal unity. For us humans, our highest form of autonomous, differentiated consciousness is our ego consciousness, our consciousness of ourselves as separate persons in the world.
Our ego consciousness depends on the evolved physical structures of our bodies and is, therefore, mortal; it dies when our bodies die. But, we are also always part of universal primal consciousness, which is eternal. Although our individual selves are not eternal, we can know our deepest identity to be the simple, eternal unity from which all things arise. This is the essence of mysticism, of experiencing oneself in unity with God.
God beyond Religion
We have substantial understanding of the evolutionary process—of the way less complex things give rise to more complex things—but how the original, most simple stuff of the universe first came into being remains another mystery. The Big Bang may be part of the answer, but where did the energy that broke forth in the Big Bang come from, and what is the source of the ordered structure and behavior of the universe?
If evolution proceeds from simple to more complex, then one might think that tracing evolution backward through time and layers of physical structure would lead to simpler and simpler levels of being until we come to pure simplicity, which would be pure, undifferentiated unity. This unity would be the “source and ground of being”, which is Paul Tillich’s definition of God.
If you think about it deeply, such absolute unity would be simultaneously indistinguishable from complete emptiness. As the source and ground of being, it would also be the absolute fullness of possibility and the underlying substance of all that is, of all that has being. Thus God can be and is referred to paradoxically, but not at all inconsistently, as the One, the All, and Nothing (No-Thing, the non-being from which being arises) or Emptiness. This is the perspective of apophatic mysticism.
The fact that we experience our own beingness means that being happens and, therefore, has a source, which means that this God, when defined as the source and ground of being, is real—mysterious, beyond our capacity to totally understand—but real. This is not the anthropomorphized God of traditional, theistic religion, but a panentheistic God. This is consistent with how such thinkers as Spinoza and Einstein seem to have viewed God.
Human Intelligence
Understanding ourselves and our relationship to the reality in which we live requires, among other things, understanding how we understand. Here is my take on the subject. It is based on my exposure to evolutionary theory over many years and on some targeted research I have done lately, but how I weave it together is my own opinion, based partly on many years of observing my own instinctual, emotional, and cognitive activity.
The complex consciousness we humans experience cannot be separated from the structures of our bodies—especially our brains and nervous systems. These physical and consciousness structures have evolved first and foremost for survival and only secondarily for understanding. Our capacity for understanding has evolved because it helps us survive.
We have many different kinds of intelligence involving many different neurological structures, but a quick overview of the three major areas of the brain will suffice for this discussion. The first to evolve was the brain stem. This handles bodily functions, basic awareness of the environment, physical coordination, and basic instincts like hunger, thirst, fight or flight, and reproduction. It is also the source of basic emotions arising from these instincts. Next to evolve was the limbic system, which manages social behaviors and the complex reasoning and emotions that go with them. Last to emerge was our highly developed neocortex with its capacity for abstract cognition and reasoning. We experience these three levels subjectively as body, heart, and head.
Our social-emotional intelligence runs deep. It began evolving with early vertebrates almost half a billion years ago. The first dinosaurs appeared about 235 million years ago, and the first mammals 216 million years ago.[1] Paleontology has uncovered evidence that many if not all dinosaurs were social creatures. This trait remains evident today in the social behavior of birds, the only living descendants of the dinosaurs. We must only look around our world today and at ourselves to be aware of the highly social nature of mammals. The roots of our social-emotional intelligence presumably run back to common ancestors of both mammals and dinosaurs—a mind-numbingly long time ago.
The neocortex, the seat of higher-order cognition, including language and formal reasoning in us humans, began to evolve in early mammals and is found only in mammals. This evolution proceeded slowly for over 200 million years until it began to accelerate in our primate ancestors about 2.6 million years ago.[2]
The average size of the neocortex in a species has been shown to correlate with the maximum size of stable social groups formed by that species.[3] This suggests that the evolutionary development of the neocortex has been driven primarily by the evolutionary advantage of larger, more complex social groups. We need a lot of brain to be able to live together well, but by living and functioning together in large social groups, we are able to dominate our world.
Perhaps the most advantageous characteristic of the neocortex is the adaptability of its neural networks. Most other brain structures are genetically hardwired to perform fixed functions. With the neocortex, evolution has achieved a way to structure circuits whose function can be changed through learning. Whereas modification of the hardwired structures takes many generations of genetic change via natural selection, the brain can change the outputs of the neocortex by dynamically changing its connections during the lifetime of an individual. This gives us the capacity for tremendous flexibility in our thinking and behavior.
The size and cognitive capacities of the neocortex evolved slowly for a very long time in tandem with increasingly complex social behaviors. This slowness kept the cognitive capacities of most mammals well connected to and in synch with the instincts and emotions mediated by their limbic systems. However, among hominid primates during the last few million years—a mere blink in evolutionary history—the neocortex has exploded in size to give us our human brains. In that same period of time our other brain structures have continued to change at the old slower pace. This leaves us humans with a limbic system and a neocortex that are not as closely connected and coordinated as those in other mammals. While older parts of our neocortex may be closely connected to the limbic system, much of our neocortex is capable of operating quite independently, and this independence or lack thereof can be greatly influenced by learning.
This means that we humans have the capacity to think outside the box of our instincts and emotions to an extent that other mammals do not. How much this capacity is realized in any given person is a matter of learning that depends on the social and cultural circumstances of that individual and on their personal choices. I refer to thinking that remains closely connected to the instincts and emotions of the limbic system as social intelligence. I refer to higher order thinking that is substantially independent of instinct and emotion as rational intelligence. All humans have both types of intelligence, but the balance of the two can vary.
Culture Wars
I see the cultural conflicts of the modern period to arise from differences in the balance of social and rational intelligence. The traditional, religious, conservative, right-leaning, authoritarian side operates mostly from social intelligence; the modern, scientific, progressive, left-leaning, democratic side exercises rational intelligence to a much greater extent.
I shall not detail here how these differences appear in practice. For that I refer you to the book (Chapter: “The Crisis and the Way Out:, section: “A Deeper Dive”, pp. 58-61). The big underlying difference is that traditionalists trust the authority of tradition and strong leaders while modernists trust critical reason.
What I want to emphasize is that the conflict is not simply a difference of opinion and values. It is a difference of worldviews based, not simply on what the two sides think, but on what parts and capacities of the brain the two sides use to think.
Everyone is born with the social intelligence that drives the traditional side. This is a very important point: We all start out entirely driven by the hardwired instincts and emotions of social intelligence. The extent to which we are able to recognize and modify our animal nature depends on learning and the cultural and personal circumstances that influence learning. Many learn to function with sufficient rational intelligence to occupy the modern worldview, others are too immersed in traditional environments or just too lazy to do so, and plenty of folks drift somewhere in the middle. The modern side is the direction of evolution.
Moving people into the modern worldview is not just a matter of citing facts; facts bounce off the traditional worldview. To get the full benefits of rational intelligence, people must have the opportunity to learn to use it and to be open to what it offers. Education offers opportunity, but openness to reason ultimately comes from a personal choice to seek out deeper truth and understanding. A genuine choice of this sort necessarily entails a willingness to change one’s worldview, and that can be scary and painful.
The pivotal instinctual behavior that must be modified is the natural tendency to accept without question the worldview received from one’s culture and to submit to the dominance of those widely regarded to be leaders of that culture. This tendency arises from the natural instincts that order mammalian societies. Our societies have pecking orders because pecking orders have worked to support our survival. Strong leaders rise to the top and everyone else falls in line, especially when the group is threatened from the outside.
Our present culture wars are a conflict over what kind of leaders we should follow, not just politically, but broadly across our shared culture. Those under the sway of social intelligence look for leaders who come across as strong and aggressive and/or who claim to defend what their followers see as traditional and familiar. This is driven by fear and tends toward authoritarianism. Those who temper their social intelligence with reason look for leaders who demonstrate fact-based understandings of issues and who offer reasonable and fair solutions based on those facts. This is driven by critical thinking and good will and tends toward egalitarianism.
The tug-of-war between these two types of leadership has been going on for all of recorded human history. In medieval Europe, the authoritarian structures of monarchy and feudal authority held sway. At the beginning of the modern period, the Protestant Reformation undermined the authority of the Church that had kept the culture unified, and Europe collapsed into religious wars that directly and indirectly killed at least half of the population. Everyone, including the leaders, were exhausted by the conflict and death. With the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty-Years War in 1648, the European powers agreed to stop fighting over religion. Meanwhile the Enlightenment brought ideals of democracy into public view. Both these developments had direct influence on the formation of the United States of America with its separation of church and state and its ideals of freedom and equality. The battle between authoritarian domination of one form or another (feudalism, chattel slavery, wage slavery, oligarchy, colonialism, racism, fascism, etc.) and humane, progressive governance has continued in the U.S. and around the world ever since, with the egalitarian side tending to prevail (U.S. Civil War, World War II, human rights standards, civil rights movement, end of colonialism, women’s rights, LGBT+ rights, etc.). Now we are experiencing a huge authoritarian backlash driven by opportunism, greed, ignorance, misinformation, and fear. It is easy for cynical leaders to manipulate the social intelligence of those who are poorly informed and/or have weak critical-thinking skills. They need only evoke fear, prejudice, and anger.
This does not mean that social intelligence is to be rejected. First of all, that would be impossible; it is hardwired into us. More importantly, we need it! Having well-developed rational intelligence does not mean we stop being social animals; it means better understanding our social nature and being able to modify instinctual social behaviors by conscious choice. The goal is not to choose one type of intelligence over the other but to get them to work together to see the truth as best we can. This tends toward democracy based on the considered judgment of those governed. Democracy can succeed long-term only if a majority of the populace is well educated and engaged.
Myth and the Wisdom of Social Intelligence
A key point of Honest to God is that hundreds of millions of years of evolution and the deep connection of human consciousness to spirit (God, universal primal consciousness) has given social intelligence a deep collective wisdom that is expressed in traditional myths and scriptures and in related forms such as legends, folk stories, traditions, and rituals.
The huge problem is that the deep richness of this wisdom goes largely unrecognized and unappreciated by both sides of the culture wars. The problem results from the same mistake on both sides, although the mistake plays out differently between the two: Both sides focus on the literal truthfulness of the myths. The modern, rational, scientific, progressive side judges the supernatural aspect of myths to be inconsistent with our scientific understanding of the world, and, therefore, dismisses them entirely. The traditional, socially enmeshed, religious, conservative side feels duty-bound to defend the literal veracity of the myths as though the entire meaning and value of the tradition would collapse if the myths were not literally true in every detail. Both reactions miss the mark.
The problem is far greater for the traditional side than the modern side. Progressive Christianity is becoming more outspoken to say, “Yeah, we can see that our myths are probably not literally true, but look at all the deeper relational meaning and values that the tradition carries for the social and spiritual issues of our age.” The rational-scientific worldview can totally accept that. In fact, many great scientists have indicated that their worldviews have room for spiritual realities that transcend what science can know. It is the traditional side that has the heavier lift. Giving up insistence on the literal truth of their myths and scriptures can be downright terrifying for traditional people, but that is the direction things need to move.
There are two huge problems with the fundamentalist emphasis on literal truth. This goes for all religions, but I shall focus on the Christian fundamentalism I know so well. First, the idea that Christian scripture and the myths it contains are literally true is simply false. If we honestly view the miraculous aspects of our myths from the perspective of well-established science, they are not credible. Also, there is plenty of scholarship, mostly from Christian or formerly Christian scholars, that shows Christianity to be socially constructed rather than handed down by divine fiat. Christianity is just one more of the many, many religions that human culture has produced over many millennia, and it has no more claim to objective truth than any of the others. It takes a personal commitment to truth for traditionally enmeshed people to see this, but the truth is there if one has the courage and integrity to step beyond social intelligence to consider the evidence honestly.
The second problem is that emphasis on the literal veracity of scripture misdirects the attention of religious followers. This comes down to the question of what we can validly expect from Christianity or any other religion. Again, I shall focus on the Christianity I know. Traditional Christianity offers eternal life in Heaven as a reward for being a good Christian. I think this emphasis on “salvation” after death is a religious dead end. Again, I refer you to the book for my reasoning (Chapter: “The Bottom Line”). Traditional Christianity leaves adherents worrying about displeasing the big guy in the sky—very much a concern of social intelligence—instead of helping them find God in their deepest selves. It is shallow, fairy-tale religion that stunts spiritual growth and responsibility in this life by offering bogus pie in the sky for “believing” certain things. That does not mean that eternity and eternal life have no valid place in the tradition, but they need to be seen from the perspective of mature spirituality that also recognizes the mortality of the ego. Good religion helps us live more fully in this life; religion that emphasizes a life to come is selling snake oil.
Mature spirituality requires looking deep into oneself and deep into the myths for what resonates as true. Christianity is rich in such deep truth, but it takes a big shift from the perspective of fundamentalism to be able to see it. This real world in which we live is THE real world! Heaven and Hell and eternal life for the ego are not real. They are mythically meaningful, but they do not exist the way our bodies and consciousness exist in this world. There is no spiritual world apart from this world, and this world is very spiritual. There may very well be layers of spirit that transcend or underly physical being, but they are not separate from it. Our physical universe arises from spirit and is entirely permeated by spirit. This here-and-now is where real life happens, and it is fully physical and spiritual at the same time.
This real world is not an easy place to live. The mechanisms of natural selection that have driven our evolution are simultaneously wondrous and brutal. Life and death, pain and pleasure, joy and sorrow, cooperation and competition, love and self-interest are all inextricably linked. Religion is rightly about coming to terms with the paradoxical beauty and terror of the existence we share. As far as we can tell, religion of one form or another has emerged in every human social group in the world, so it would seem to arise naturally from our social intelligence. Myth, as the language of traditional religion, would seem to be the way our collective social intelligence thinks and expresses itself. Myth expresses the wisdom of hundreds of millions of years of social evolution. It does so through thoughts and narratives that are simultaneously metaphorical and relational. Honest to God directly and indirectly points to what I think are the most important deep meanings of Christian mythology.
The Essential Thing
Those of us who find ourselves deeply connected to or attracted to Christianity have a choice: we can hold the tradition as a fantasy that offers escape from our fears—a very natural tendency—or we can engage with the tradition as a path to knowing ourselves, reality, and our relationships in deep wholeness. The first option, though very inviting, is one of immature self-deception; the other is an option of honest courage. We can see Jesus as a magical savior who will take us to Heaven with little effort on our part, or we can take up and carry our own crosses to follow Jesus in personally connecting more deeply to reality (God) and to strive for justice and compassion. In the first option, we identify with and futilely try to preserve our mortal egos; with the second option we come to know that our deepest identity is the source and ground from which all things arise. The eventual outcome is the same for all. There is no truly wrong choice and no Hell for those who make that choice. We all come from the unity/emptiness that can be referred to as God, and we all return to that unity/emptiness. The difference is that knowing it brings a “peace that passes understanding” to our life here and now.
This reality we occupy is the divine mystery experiencing itself. We and all things are bits of God through which God experiences God’s self. The universe and evolution have a purpose: The One experiences itself in the Many, and the Many come to know themselves as the One.
Knowing—i.e., direct experience—is the crucial thing. Understanding helps us move in the right direction, but the deep mystery cannot finally be understood; it must be known in direct experience. Spiritual practice is a path to deeper experience and awareness.
[1] Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry. The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era—A Celebration of the Unfolding Cosmos (New York: HarperCollins, 1994), 271.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_the_brain
[3] Robin I. M. Dunbar and Susanne Shultz, “Social complexity and the fractal structure of group size in primate social evolution,” Biological Reviews 96, no. 5 (2021): 1889-1906. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/brv.12730
© John Speers 2025
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