Diarmuid O’Murchu is an Irish member of the Sacred Heart Missionary Order, a social psychologist, workshop leader, and teacher in the Celtic and Catholic traditions, an avid student of brain theory and evolution, and a prolific author who uses scientific discovery to illuminate the meaning of human existence. He is part of our Living Spiritual Teacher Project.
In this book, O’Murchu is concerned with all of these topics plus ecology, religious faith, and technology. He opens new ways of answering the most basic and essential questions, such as: Why are we here? How did our journey as human beings begin? And what do we do, now?
Along the way, he defines for the reader the meaning of important terms and tools such as consciousness and the difference between “brain” and “mind”: “The mind can be understood as the driver of the human body, and the brain interacts with signals or instructions given by the mind. Brain and mind are both interrelated, interdependently entangled for the benefit of the person. Attempts to separate the two, to disentangle them, have plagued philosophers for centuries.”
O’Murchu also utilizes a field of study that may be new to readers, called paleoanthropology, using biological and cultural evidence to understand human being origins. See the excerpt accompanying this review for an example of this, when O’Murchu shows paleoanthropology enlightening traditional religion.
Most of all, he wants readers to grasp that we’re not an exceptional or “superior” species, but rather, creative and “super-intelligent earthlings.” In other words, creatures, earth-centered, and defined by our “bioregion,” a term O’Murchu borrows from one of his most important teachers, Thomas Berry.
What O’Murchu means by this is that “Ours is a relational identity” — we didn’t and don’t choose it; it was “bestowed upon us by the universe.” Humility comes from this acceptance, but also an ability to see the way forward within climate and ecological crises.
He concludes: “We can no longer live on our own, nor can we rely on a theology that keeps God at a static distance from the world. Neither this anthropology nor this theology makes sense in our evolutionary age. The critical issue now is our symbiosis with the natural world.”
