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Reason, P. (1993). Reflections on Sacred Experience and Sacred Science. Journal of Management Inquiry, 2(3), 273-283.

This paper argues that a secular science is inadequate for our times and points to the pressing need to re-sacralize our experience of ourselves and our world. It suggests that a sacred human inquiry based on love, beauty, wisdom and engagement is one of the highest virtues and possibilities of human consciousness.

These first words of Matthew Fox in his 1991 Schumacher Lecture reinforced my intention to articulate a spiritual dimension of human inquiry. The question, "What would an ecological science look like?" is nearly as important as "What would an ecological religion look like?" since it is the scientific myth of materialism that has, hand in hand with capitalism and religion, helped us in our march toward a secular, a disenchanted world.

In this paper I begin with an autobiographical account of my growing concern for these matters, and show how this concern is matched by contemporary critics of Western epistemology. This leads me to suggest that an ecological science will be a sacred science, and will be as concerned with questions of love, beauty and right action as with questions of knowledge. I then sketch out some characteristics of a sacred inquiry process.

My growing concern for the quality of sacredness has developed as I have explored shamanic paths and learned particularly from the Medicine Wheel teachings (Storm 1972; see also Note 1). Several times over the past years in Medicine Wheel ceremonies, those of us studying this path have been confronted by our teachers for not treating the space we are in as sacred -- a space carefully prepared with an altar and with power objects present, a space into which we have called the Powers of the Four Directions. I think that for a long time I regarded the teachings as another version of transpersonal psychology, as fine and beautiful but essentially secular. So I couldn't really work out what all the fuss was about, and on many occasions I experienced these confrontations as having a quality of scolding, and have retreated into a place of hurt child.

Then all of a sudden I learned something new. I heard for the first time the challenge that we in the West had lost the feeling for sacredness, the ability to notice the sacredness of our world, and that we need to discover this anew if we are to learn from the traditions of Native Americans. One is entering a different world, a world that is again alive and enchanted, a world in which all sentient beings bring their gifts of teachings, and are thus worthy of honour. Such an animate world is akin to that inhabited by the alchemists, and can only be comprehended fully through a participatory consciousness (Berman, 1981).

Reflecting on my own life experience I can see the intense secular quality of what I have been taught. We went regularly to a Congregational Church when I was young. Apart from romanticised teaching in Little Church about "Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild", this was a primarily cerebral, rational, and certainly

non-ceremonial tradition. I remember in my teens engaging in arguments with devout Christians (often fundamentalists) in which I scorned the idea of transcendental God. I remember arguing with the Chaplain at School, who taught that the point of religion was the worship of God; my view was that the only worthwhile purpose of religion would be to make us live better lives with our fellow men (sic). In my later teens I became quite directly secular in my views, joining the humanist society at University and seeking answers to the questions of existence through psychological study. I was particularly influenced by existentialism, by the notion that we are our choices, that we are responsible for our lives in the face of a totally contingent existence.

This secular approach to life took off into a satisfying career when I discovered organizational development and humanistic psychology. At last here were technologies through which we could adopt a humanist, person-centred and problem-solving approach to the world's problems. Feminism too seemed to have exciting things to say about how we ordered and might re-order our world.

Much of my professional work involved the development of the theory and practice of co-operative experiential inquiry, which took me along a similar road. In Human Inquiry (Reason and Rowan 1981), Human Inquiry in Action (Reason 1988a) and a series of associated papers I presented and developed the argument that the key characteristic of the human person is the capacity for self-direction. If we are to fully respect this capacity and allow it to flourish we must treat all those involved in an inquiry as at least potentially self-determining, and thus see them as co-researchers involved equally in the action and in the reflection that is part of inquiry. This methodology is a great improvement on the objectifying and alienating approach of orthodox social sciences, but remains within an essentially humanistic worldview in which "Man is the measure of all things".

Cracks appeared along the way in this secular quest. There was the occasional crisis in my later teens about the meaningless of my life; there were "odd" experiences in various groups which seemed to point to a wider reality. There were some more startling experiences of non-ordinary reality in ceremony and at power spots (for example at an ancient stone circle near the tip of Cornwall). But I was for a long while able to treat these as curiosities about which I could chatter as part of my slightly eccentric and offbeat presentation of self. I am not sure how seriously I ever took them.

So I am not quite sure if I can tell where the leap happened, and anyway some experiences should remain private. I am now prepared to take more seriously -- indeed I am taking more seriously -- the reality that the planet earth and all her worlds are sacred space. This means that our experience, our knowing, and our action, at its best, will also be sacred. My point is that this is in profound contradiction to the secularized experience, knowledge and action of Western society. My further point is that if we are to live our lives as high quality inquiry (to which I remain committed as a dream) we need to look at the idea and the experience of inquiry as sacred too.

For me the idea, the dream, of a fully human inquiry represents one of the highest virtues and possibilities of human consciousness. It is a process through which we may honour our human lives and the planet which nurtures us. It is a process through which we live fully in our experience, participating in creating our lives with others and with the many worlds of our experience; and to which we also bring a loving, imaginative, exploratory, critical, sense-making reflection which informs our future action and experience. In this paper I wish to begin an exploration of the some of the qualities this may entail.

But first, let me put my autobiographical sketch alongside a brief account of the epistemological crisis facing the West as seen by some contemporary writers. And here I will just touch on one or two key points, assuming that the reader has some familiarity with this material. First, Gregory Bateson's work (1972, 1979) points to what he terms "errors in epistemology" in treating the living world, the creatura, in the terms of the non-living world, the pleroma. A related error lies in separating what is "in here" from what is "out there" thus cutting the circuits of Mind which are immanent in living ecologies. The errors are the result of thinking in terms of energy rather than of information, of cause and effect rather than the "pattern which connects". To repeat a famous quote

Despite his use of the metaphor God, Bateson is of course committed to his cybernetic vision of creation -- "neither mechanical nor supernatural", as he writes in Angels Fear (1987) -- and is deeply suspicious of the spiritual perspective. But his emphasis on the immanence of Mind in living systems is congruent with the vision I am pursuing. Similarly James Lovelock's (1979) articulation of the Gaia hypothesis that the planet Earth is a living being rests fairly firmly within a materialist worldview yet speaks an inspiring vision. Peter Russell (1982, 1992) has developed this hypothesis to suggest we are at a critical point in the evolution of Gaia's consciousness as human beings together may take the next step in self-reflexive consciousness.

Morris Berman's wonderful book The Re-enchantment Of The World explores the roots of our crisis -- a crisis not only social and economic but epistemological -- in the shift away from a participating consciousness to a mechanical worldview that took place with startling rapidity in Europe in the seventeenth century:

Of course, as Berman points out so forcefully, to see nature in this way is in the end to see ourselves in this way, as writers from Blake to Nietzsche to Laing have pointed out, so what we feel is a "sickness in the soul", and our behaviour in the world is as Wilhelm Reich described, alienated from experience through character armour -- the defenses are structured into our musculature, our posture, our breathing and our movement, and into our similarly over-structured and repressive social and organizational arrangements. At its extreme (and it seems we may be reaching that extreme) this produces a human society which is essentially destructive. Berman argues that some kind of participative, holistic consciousness must emerge is we are to survive as a species.

Henryk Skolimowski's recent contribution to the debate (1992) starts with the similar point that "we have constructed a deficient code for reading nature, leading to a deficiency in interacting with nature" (p. 1); we need a new matrix for our action, because given the current framework our action "continuously misfires". Central to his construction of an "eco-cosmology" is the idea of a participatory mind: mind is present in all constructions of our knowledge and in all pictures of the world. All experience is influenced by our perspective. But this is not in any sense a limitation on knowledge, because our mind "invariably and tirelessly elicits (through its various faculties and sensitivities) from the amorphous primordial data of the universe" (p. 20), and thus co-creates with the universe. Skolimowski goes beyond the Kantian argument that our knowledge is limited by the categories of thought to suggest that human consciousness is part of the celebratory self-creating dance of the cosmos.

For those readers for whom the term "mind" may feel exclusively cerebral I should point out that Skolimowski employs it with an encompassing meaning. For example, he uses the interesting term "reverential thinking", since "for the appreciative and sensitive mind, reverence for life appears as a natural acknowledgement of the miracle and the beauty of life itself" (p 24). This means, he suggests, that good research will be conducted from a "state of grace".

If we turn to the teachings of creation spirituality (Fox, 1983) we find another critique of Western epistemology in a revisioning of the notion of sin:

Finally, in this brief review of reflections on our epistemological crisis, I will turn to Christopher Fry's poetic writing (1985), much quoted but still carrying an important vision:

These personal experiences and my study of the epistemological crisis of our world lead me to the intuition that to be person-centred or humanistic is not enough; to be planet-centred is more satisfying yet still secular. Human endeavours must be both grounded in immediate experience of the presence of the world and contained within a wider cosmology; so an essentially mystic/spiritual worldview underpins my thoughts about quality in human inquiry (Fox, 1988).

As I reach for a vision of a sacred cosmos words (necessarily) begin to be difficult, but let me make some attempts. I see a cosmos which is at the same time both unitary and multiple, both One and Many. In this cosmos are present many individual spiritual centres of consciousness (of which human persons are one kind), which are also connected in the web of the One (Heron, 1992). I see a world in which the physical is one lodge of the spirit, a panentheistic world in which spirit is both immanent and transcendent. Look around you at life on earth and you may experience the presence of the immanent Goddess, as Starhawk points out (1979). Call the transcendent spirit God if you will, or Great Spirit, Wakantanka, but know that these are names for an ultimate unspeakable mystery. A sacred world is alive, it contains many different worlds -- mineral, plant, animal, human, spirit, with their different consciousnesses and their different gifts; and such a world is sacramental in that it is the embodiment of the divine (Sherrard, 1987).

One way of expressing this is through the Medicine Wheel:

The human is the determiner, the one who through self-reflexive consciousness and intent may co-create many different worlds. So our experience will be sacred or secular partly according to the purpose and intent we bring to it. In contrast to the doctrine that we are passive receptors of sense experience, a sacred and enchanted world will respond to the intentionality of the human mind and spirit. If we take a materialistic and utilitarian view of the planet as non-living matter, then to a large extent that is the way the planet will be. And if we see the planet as ensouled, as Gaia or as Grandmother Earth, then she will unfold for us as living spirit. To a large extent it is a matter of our human intention. Hence the importance of determining our purpose, of choosing what is worthy of our attention and the manner of our attention, above all of envisioning the qualities of the world we wish to inhabit and living in accordance with that vision.

Now I do not mean this as a naive statement of "we can determine our own reality". But I do mean to emphasise that the paradigms which frame our vision are self-sealing, over-determined systems of experience, thought and belief which bring to us only that which we allow them to bring. We can chose the mirror we hold, the aspects of the cosmic dance to which we wish to make ourselves available.

So it seems to me that this must mean that human inquiry must be grounded in a sense of the sacred, and its purpose must be to nurture the growth of love, beauty, wisdom and compassionate action. These are important for the flowering of all forms of life. Yet I am sufficiently a child of my education to want to hold also to some intellectual rigour: I wish to heal the barrenness of the isolated intellect by bringing it into relationship with emotional, practical, aesthetic and spiritual rigour, and to discover what these are. Through a process of human inquiry we may learn to walk in spirit, walk in beauty, walk in wisdom, walk in skill, and we may through this learn what we mean by spirit, beauty, truth and skill..... maybe that is one way of seeing the quest.

Thus human inquiry is one path toward creative experience of our world, which includes experience of the sacred whole; representation of that experience in ways that bring beauty; understanding and framing of that experience in ways that are not alienated; and action and engagement to heal ourselves and our planet. Thus experience, representation, understanding and action are four aspects of sacred inquiry I wish to consider.

We are, it seems, alienated from our experience, identified with false selves (Laing, 1967). A major contribution of existentialist philosophy has been to point out the extent of this alienation:

This suggests that we might think of human inquiry not so much as a search for truth as a way of healing alienation. Our attempts to define validity in our newer forms of inquiry, drawing as they have on analogies with orthodox research (eg Lincoln and Guba, 1986) have been struggles in vain. The existentialist position suggests to us that quality inquiry would seek first to acknowledge and then to heal our alienation, and that in doing this it would shock or otherwise disturb our cozy acceptance of our alienated existence.

If we wish to talk about experience, we must have some notion of the human person as one centre of experience. John Heron's Feeling and Personhood (1992) offers a perspective on the human being which I find sympathetic. For Heron the person is a "fundamental spiritual reality, a distinct presence in the world" (p. 52), a view of the person which avoids several traps: it doesn't reduce the person to a biological or social animal, nor does it see the individual as a separated and alienated ego; it also avoids the "transpersonal" fallacy that the person is no more than an illusion on the way to Nirvana (Wilber, 1980). We are here and we are "real", and our reality includes material and social and psychological and spiritual dimensions.

I should note in passing that for Heron the person may progressively actualize through eight different states from the primal person in the foetal world to the "living presence" of the transpersonal, charismatic person. Being a person in the fullest sense is therefore "an achievement of education and self-development" (p. 52), and most of us are still at some stage of developing potential.

Heron portrays the psyche has having four primary modes of functioning: affective, imaginal, conceptual and practical (Note 2). In the affective mode, the basis of experience, the psyche reaches to the individuating pole of emotion -- joy, surprise, fear, grief, anger etc -- and also to the participatory pole of feeling, which Heron describes as

This feeling dimension is the grounding of psyche and of the person. It is the "root and fundament" (p. 20) of all other modes, through which I

This view is in accord with Whitehead's view (1933) that the ultimate metaphysical reality is creative experience. In similar vein Martin Buber (1958) writes of the "two primary words I-Thou and

I-It". I speak the primary word I-Thou when, as a whole being, I am in relationship with the other, equally as whole being. The world of I-Thou is a world of no bounds, a world of relations. On the other hand, I speak the primary word I-It when I relate to my world in terms of bounded objects, thus fragmenting both myself and my world.

Morris Berman argues persuasively that a participatory consciousness must be at the heart of all knowing, even of the scientific knowing which denies it. He follows Polanyi (1962) in pointing out how we emphasise the analytical, digital, conscious modes of knowing without acknowledging that these must rest on the vast bed of tacit, analogic, necessarily unconscious knowing.

To explore more fully this participatory consciousness one needs to turn to an experience of participation, since words as concepts by their very nature tend to separate us from our experience. This might take the form of a vision quest, or of wilderness experience as recommended by the exponents of deep ecology (Seed et al, 1988). For a micro teaching in participatory consciousness the following experiment (which is adapted from Skolimowski, 1991) is worth trying.

This participative consciousness is part of a re-sacralization of the world, a re-enchantment of the world. Sacred experience is based in reverence, in awe and love for creation, valuing it for its own sake, in its own right as a living presence. It is based in the e-motions -- zest, joy, passion -- that help the life process flow as opposed to the stuck unexpressed emotions which may distort experience. Quality inquiry will be rooted in love for oneself and for the world in which and with which one inquires. We may learn much about this from Matthew Fox (1983) and his view of a creation centred spirituality, which begins in awe and delight at the beauty and richness of creation.

Fox (1991) suggests as a first commandment, "Thou shalt fall in love at least three times a day", meaning by this that one can reach out in love to all different aspects of creation. He contrasts this via positiva which starts in awe and love, with the more orthodox fall/redemption theology which has original sin as its starting point.

Similarly sacred inquiry will similarly start with awe and love, rather than with the suspicion, scepticism and defensiveness which is at the root of so much of our current worldview and science (Maslow, 1966; Devereaux, 1967).

However, while emphasizing that participative consciousness starts with love, awe and delight, we must also honour the dark side of our experience, "sitting with what is spoiled" as my friend Alan Bleakley puts it. (Personal communication; see also Bleakley, 1989). We are indebted to Jung for drawing attention to the shadow of our experience and endeavours, and to Hillman for pointing out the importance of pathologizing:

As Hillman draws our attention to pathologizing, so Fox points to the second path of creation spirituality, the via negativa which demands that we let go, empty ourselves, let darkness be darkness, pain be pain and silence be silence (Fox, 1983). Acceptance of the shadow, of pathology, of the via negativa is essential for deepening our experience beyond a humanistic perspective dominated by ego needs to an experience of the sacred.

We cannot express experience directly, even to ourselves. Once the immediacy of the moment has passed we need to re-member it for ourselves, and to re-present it in some form if we wish to communicate with others. As John Heron points out, the first step from experiential knowing is not to concepts and ideas, but to images, dream, story, poetry and metaphor. This presentational knowledge is an important (and often neglected) bridge between experiential knowledge and propositional knowledge.

The idea that what is important is to Walk in Beauty, as the traditional Navaho prayer would have us, is strange to Western ways of thinking. But it seems to me central to a worthwhile epistemology that it's knowing is beautiful. "What is the warrant for your knowing?" is the traditional epistemological question. To my mind one sound answer might be, "It is beautiful", or, "It leads to a beautiful life". As Whitehead has it, it is "beauty which provides the final contentment for the Eros of the Universe" (1933; p. 18). Certainly many of the outcomes of a utilitarian worldview are not beautiful.

Hillman's essay The Thought of the Heart (1981) explores many of these issues. For Hillman through the thought of the heart we open ourselves to creative imagination, "the imagination in which and by which the spirit moves from the heart towards all origination" (p. 1); through this imaginative power we may experience what is essentially real. This means we may avoid the "modern psychological illusions" which lead us to confuse the imaginal with the subjective, and the externally real with the essentially real. This imaginal world, then might be seen as the world of sacred essentials, not to be confused with either a subjective or an objective "gloss" on experience.

The heart which is capable of such knowing is hidden behind several disguises:

Coeur de Lion takes us outward into activity, into display in the world; it is other and outer-directed, with an animal "wholehearted" quality, not recognising reflection as such but as an aspect of activity. The Heart of Harvey in reducing the heart of a pump brings to us a literalized consciousness, and thus as I have explored above, a literalized and mechanical world. The Heart of Augustine is the personal heart from which the imaginal is driven out by personal feeling, so there remains only subjectivity. Thus:

Modern psychology is much occupied with the idea of projection, in which what is belongs "inside" is placed on objects "outside".

In contrast to these three "disguises" Hillman presents the Heart of Beauty. He points to the thrill of the experience of beauty, and writes

Fox (1992) makes a similar point that the West has not heard the mention of beauty in three hundred years of theology. For Hillman, beauty is not superficial adornment, but "the essential condition of creation as manifestation" (p. 28; original italics). In a comment that may remind us of Bateson's (1979) notion of the pattern which connects, he points to the original Greek sense of cosmos as

and thus quite different from the Roman imperialist and monotheist notion of a Universe.

All this takes beauty from the surface to the core, an essential aspect of the pattern which connects:

Thus to take in the world, to breathe it in fully, is to take it to our heart and allow it to speak to us and to show us its heart and soul. For presentational knowing is the way through which "the heart's thought personifies, ensouls, and animates the world" (1981,
p. 30).

But what, I hear you ask, about ugliness? Hillman asks this too, and points out that psychotherapy has had a pathologising eye (in Jung's celebrated phrase, "the gods have become diseases"); and so too has much research in its creation of an ugly utilitarian worldview. We need "an eye for ugliness" in human inquiry, particularly for the ugliness that would standardize, secularise, and dry out the delights of the inquiring life -- the kind of ugliness that characterises much of what we find in social science journals these days.

Often, when people re-discover the magic of participatory experience and the possibilities of presentational knowing, they reject ideas, concepts and theories. This is understandable, since language when used to classify and label leads to a reinforcement of the split between subject and object. As Heron points out, "The concept drives a wedge between the psyche and its world" (1992, p. 146): once we loose touch with participative consciousness and with the co-creative, transactional nature of perception we identify with the words that name our perceptions, thus reifying the world and setting ourselves up as subjects vis-a-vis and objective world.

However, one of our gifts as human persons is the gift of wisdom and understanding. While certainly the shadow side of this is rigid and reifying conceptual structures, the light side is the ability to frame a limitless variety of understandings and descriptions of our world which open new possibilities for humanity and for the cosmos. As human persons we bring as our gift the endless variety of ways we can dance with the primordial givenness of the cosmos.

But it is so easy to become caught in the maze of our conceptual structures, so easy to take them for reality. I remember listening to Reb Anderson, a Zen monk, describing how we create our world and how we may become fooled by our own creation. We need to notice ourselves moment to moment as we create our world, he said, because we can then understand that these forms are illusory

If you don't catch your world at the moment you create it you can be pushed around by it; then you need to start trying to push it around.

One form of language that will help avoid this kind of reification is dialectical and paradoxical (Reason and Rowan, 1981; Berman 1981; Wilber also writes of mandalic knowledge, 1981). Formal Aristotelian logic states that no proposition can be both true and false at the same time, and that every proposition is either true or false. These assumptions, while they may be helpful in certain (quite limited) circumstances, also lead us directly to the reification of our concepts.

So while a traditional logic creates a dichotomy, a dialectical ontology embraces the paradox of opposites. Dialectics involves a recognition of the inseparability of two apparent opposites, and an exploration of the interplay between these interdependent poles, because "what lies between the poles is more substantial than the poles themselves" (Watts, 1963). As Watts points out, this understanding of polarities is quite different from the splitting of opposites into a duality. In dialectical thinking and experience, we explore and seek to understand the interdependence, interpenetration and the unity of the two poles. Then we can maybe understand the co-created realities within which we live as moments within this dialectic where we may exist for a while.

We can see this kind of thinking expressed in Bateson's "syllogism in grass:

as well as in Laing's "knots":

The disciplines needed for dialectical thinking are phenomenal, and certainly are not taught in our schools or universities. Dialectical thinking may be metaphoric and poetic rather than literal (Bleakley, 1989); it is demonic and ironic rather than logical (Torbert, 1991). Dialectical thinking is "post-linguistic", to use Heron's term (1992), in that it self-reflexively draws attention to the distorting possibilities of its own categories: it is aware that the map is not the territory, that the map even is not the map.

My own experience suggests that it is not possible to escape from our normal logical thought modes by just thinking about it: one needs to be shocked out of one's thought patterns by paradoxical events time and again: shocked by direct experience that involves the defenses of the body. And each time one may see the old thought patterns inexorably take over again; reading Castaneda's early accounts of his work with Don Juan (1976) provides some interesting accounts of this.

Another helpful discipline is openness to chaos: John Heron and I have suggested that in the conduct of co-operative inquiry a descent into chaos -- into an experience of the arbitrariness, randomness, chaos, indeterminacy, and thus paradoxically the enormous creative potential of experience -- may often facilitate the emergence of new order. (Reason and Heron 1986; Heron 1989). It is interesting to compare this insight with Berman's account of the alchemical process:

But the alchemical tradition sees the resulting personality as prematurely and rigidly structured, as an "aborted metal that sulfur fixed too quickly":

Judi Marshall and I have noticed in our work with postgraduate research students the fine line that is walked between dialectical paradox and Aristotelean order; at worst between chaos in which all is lost in confusion and order in which all is lost through calcification. One creative way through is to allow the experience of inquiry itself to speak thoroughly, to pay attention to dream and metaphor, to build fully on the representational knowing so that the words, logical or metaphorical, grow out of this deep experience. I suspect also that we need to return to the knowing of the body more often than we do, for as Berman points out, it is the body that holds the residues of holistic consciousness.

A sacred inquiry will be one in which people can act to heal their lives and their worlds. It is a science of engagement, a science of action. Knowledge is for action (MacMurray, 1957), for the worthwhile transformation of our world. Bill Torbert has articulated this nicely, in describing his vision of action inquiry as

Torbert's purpose is to reach for both justice and high quality work; he continuously challenges us to develop our ability to reflect, moment to moment, whether our actions a fitting our purposes, whether they are sufficiently subtle and supple, ironic and where necessary diabolic:

Similarly, as John Heron points out, practical knowledge is the "final outcrop" of what he terms the "up-hierarchy of knowledge, from experiential to presentational to propositional" (1992, p. 172). The validity of practical knowledge rests on the "canons of competence" in the application of skills: "Skills are a blessed relief. They bring us to the business of living" (1992, p. 173).

It seems to me that we must rediscover the Buddhist notion of "right action" (Schumacher 1977; Reason, 1988b), and that the purpose of right action in the present time must be for healing: for healing the rift between persons and the experience; between persons and others, between groups and societies; between our human existence and the requirements of the ecology of the planet; and between ourselves and the realm of spirit, however one may wish to speak of that.

So in reflecting on right action, of engagement with our world for the purpose of healing, I come back full circle to the issue of the alienation of modern human persons. And this is fitting because while I have abstracted (and thus maybe alienated) four different aspects of human inquiry -- experience, representation, understanding, and action -- these of course also interpenetrate and inform each other. At any aware moment we may make sense of our actions, represent them to ourselves and to each other, and experience both ourselves as acting and the consequences of our action. This is close to Torbert's (1991) proposal for action inquiry based on a consciousness that can attend to all four "territories" of experience. Knowledge-in-action may be seen as this kind of living synthesis, a dance between experience of the sacred and management of the practical -- and is of course a phenomenal challenge.

And yet it is also helpful to hold the four aspects of human inquiry separate, to see them in an inquiry cycle involving phases of action and reflection. Seen from this perspective we first engage in action, experience ourselves acting and notice the consequences; we then move away from action into reflection, developing images and making sense of what we have done; this sense-making may then revise our action plans for the next cycle. Such cycles, along the lines of cycles of co-operative experiential inquiry (Reason and Heron, 1986), offer a discipline and a framework within which aware action may develop.

Whether we experience these four aspects of human inquiry as interpenetrating, as following each other in a cyclical fashion, or as some combination of these two, we must attend to all four. For to be stuck with one aspect, to over-invest in one phase, is to pathologize it so it turns against us, and thus to lose all. As John Rowan showed us in his dialectical cycle of research (1981), we must commit ourselves fully and in depth to each phase of inquiry, and be open to the emergence of the next opposing aspect demanding attention in its proper time.

Further, in all our inquiry and our attempts to bring love, beauty, wisdom and creative action to our world, we must recognise both the light and the dark: as we attend to experience we must respect the essential mystery, the impossibility of experiencing all; as we reach for beauty we must acknowledge ugliness; as we illuminate and understand we must know what is beyond understanding; and as we act we must also know when to leave alone.

We are, I believe, at a time a serious challenge to our secular worldview: wherever we look it "continuously misfires". We cannot go back to a Medieval participative consciousness, but maybe we can see that that which the mechanical worldview discarded along with a tired Scholasticism -- the notion of a living, sacred cosmos -- can inform our notions of inquiry so we can develop a new kind of sacred science.

Sacred human inquiry would integrate a critical self-reflexive consciousness with a deep experience of the sacred, and would thus make a major contribution to what Maslow (1971) referred to as the "further reaches" of human nature.

1. By Medicine Wheel teachings I mean that version of the sacred teachings of Native Americans that has become available to white people through books such as Seven Arrows (Storm, 1972) and the workshops and ceremonies conducted by those native, metis, and white teachers with whom I have had contact. I am sensitive to the need when speaking of the teachings of an indigenous people like the Native Americans to acknowledge both that the teachings are wide and diverse between different tribes; that I am not a Native American and cannot claim their experience; and that some Native American groups and organizations object strongly to white people using (they would say abusing) their traditional teachings. Nevertheless I wish to give thanks for the beauty that these teachings have brought to my life, and acknowledge with gratitude and respect the sources; in particular I wish to thank Arwyn Dreamwalker and members of the Dreamweavers Morningstar Lodge.

2. These four modes of psyche are of course very close to the four aspects of human inquiry I am articulating in this essay.

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to those who have read and commented on drafts of this paper: Alan Bleakley, John Heron, Arwyn Larkin, Judi Marshall, Malcolm Parlett, David Sims, Peter Tatham, and Bill Torbert.

References

Buber, M. (1958). I and Thou. Edinburgh, T & T Clark.

Castaneda, C. (1976). Tales of power. London: Penguin.