We live in challenging times. It is entirely natural, therefore, that we should at least be aware of the possibility that we might fail to grasp the challenge of climate change today. If this is the case, we will be confronted by the need for ever more radical solutions. We may then need to ask the question: just how quickly and radically can we change? What should we do now in order to encourage or indeed to enable such a change? And what might such a change look like if we find that we are all, or many of us, across our different cultures, in this together? Our response to these questions will always depend upon what we consider to be our resources. What instruments do we have in our ‘toolbox’ of rapid change, as a species? Where there are gaps, how quickly might we be able to put such instruments in place? Three ‘instruments’ in particular appear to suggest themselves as having the potential to help us to manage change without disrupting stability. Here we have to draw upon the resources of our own history. The first is religion. We have seen in our own more recent past just how quickly people can turn to the long-term stability of religious beliefs and practices in the face of radical new challenges. In their long continuity, structures of change are presupposed in established religious communities. It would seem natural then that many people might turn to institutions which retain their recognisability in the face of the challenges of significant and rapid change. But secondly we need to point to our contemporary science. Science can have the important role of ‘re-educating’ us. Science and applied technologies together have the potential to be instruments which will allow us to change our world in highly positive ways. But this is the case only if we can use our science and applied technologies in radically humanising ways. As we are all well aware, it is in large part the misuse of our humanity in these resources of science and technology that underlies the acuteness of our problems today. We find self-interest, deceit, and greed, where healthy human values should be in charge. It is concealment of the abusive power of others, generally for monetary interests, which sustains these multiplying systems of exploitation. Self-interested control behind the scenes, of media and of resources, have allowed a ‘second’ or ‘hollow’ reality to develop which surrounds and suffocates the first. It is the challenges posed today by this ‘second’, exploitative reality which have been so damaging, and are so difficult to correct. Thirdly then, what is required is nothing short of our re-humanisation. This need not be something that happens on a grand scale, however. But it does need to be authentic. Perhaps we can state it in the following terms: what we need is the re-emergence of emergence. We need to be able to experience the possibility of deep renewal again, through accessing something in our history which was renewal once but which has now been overlaid by elements that seem wholly to cloud or disrupt our native human sociality. What we need is a ‘re-awakening’. But what is it that could provide the rigour within such a re-emergence? We shall see, but it is likely to turn out that the only cognitive discipline which can engage in depth with these questions is Phenomenology. It is Phenomenology, then, which might be the potential midwife of a repeating ‘re-emergence’. The symmetry principle already makes its contribution before we ever write or discover the formulas and equations, because it places conditions on what sorts of equations could make sense. And science is all about making sense or finding the sense that can be made. Symmetry principles in fact play an important role, because they amount to meta-laws which express higher-level principles that basic laws of motion must respect if they are to make certain types of sense.2 Steane emphasises here that reality is already structured as potential meaning. He describes this in terms of the individual parts of the car engine, each of which must function in an appropriate way, and then, secondly, also in terms of the whole: all the parts together. This state of affairs can be described as ‘translational invariance’, which refers to the viability of objects that we can identify in the world. The truth of the whole, in this example, is the simple but important observation that the functioning of a car engine does not depend on the location of the car. The truth of the parts is the behaviour of the pistons and fuel and the equations that describe them. The physics and chemistry of these motions have translational invariance, and this is an important, insightful and simplifying observation that gets to grips with the big picture without needing to trouble about the details. This truth about the whole is not negated by the truths about the parts … As soon as you even suppose that there is an equation for the car, it must have this symmetry.3 Steane continues: ‘The symmetry principle is first a guide, and then, in a certain hard-to-express but beautiful sense, it “inhabits” the equations of physics. The concrete phenomena that are in the world are a sort of physical embodiment of the symmetry principles.’4 Looking at the history of physics in modern times, Steane adds: ‘As Philip Anderson (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1977) put it in a famous paper, “It is only a slight exaggeration to say that physics is the study of symmetry.”’ In summary, then, Steane suggests that there are two kinds of causality: first, efficient causality, which builds up ‘from below’, and second, symmetry, which seems to come down ‘from above’, allowing for the possibility of ‘translational invariance’ and thus the emergence of discrete ‘things’ (which are harmonically composed of different parts). Things have to exist long enough for us to identify and use them. But they cannot exist forever. In between there is an inhabitable world: a world that constitutes itself in the ‘beauty of symmetry’. If ‘symmetry 1’ underlines the principles by which we survive in our viable world, then ‘symmetry 2’ points to the specifically human form of ‘translational invariance’. It points to that form of symmetry which is entirely human. ‘Translational invariance’ exists both in us and in the world around us. Indeed, if the things around us show a constancy value, which is predicated on a certain cohesion, then so too do we. The millions of cells which constitute the human body are constantly being renewed while my body remains my own. I essentially remain the same person I was when I was growing up far away from where I am now. But there is more to us than this. We might say that we constantly undergo processes of creation, often with the help of those we trust. We create ‘translational invariance’ specifically through processes of decision-making which determine the kind of person we are becoming. Here, constancy has a vitally important role in the formation of our social and personal identity. Today we have a far better understanding of the neural processes that are involved when we make significant decisions about what we shall do, and who we shall be. These also sit within the harmonic frame of reference of the principle of information-harmony, and concern how we change, grow, and become. Robert Kane, a leading scholar in the fields of Neurology and Philosophy, describes the ‘hot’ conditions of conflicting possibilities of identity which exist when we are confronted with the need to make significant ethical decisions in contexts we have never experienced before. These represent ‘movement away from thermal equilibrium—in short a kind of stirring up of chaos in the brain that makes it sensitive to micro-indeterminacies at the neuronal level’.5 If the human brain is a kind of ‘parallel processor (…) which can simultaneously process different kinds of information relevant to tasks such as perception or recognition through different neural pathways’, then this processing capacity is seemingly ‘essential to the exercise of free will.’6 There are two complementary systems in play here. The first is ‘bottom-up’ and conflicted, with competing possibilities of action and therefore identity, while the second is ‘top-down’, leading to harmonisation, integration, and the global unity of the self.7 We make such ethical decisions by inhabiting the different competing images of the self as these combine and re-combine in the brain. They inform our ethical decision-making as inherent possibilities which can subtly be imaginatively explored.8 The key to difficult ethical decision-making, in which none of the initial possibilities appear to allow resolution, is time, effort, and finally the formation of new neural pathways in the brain through the top-down effect. These create the possibility of a new future and a viable, evolving identity, and they constitute personal ‘growth’. At this point we cannot separate questions of identity from questions of growth, and with ‘growth’, there comes the issue of freedom. For us today, in particular, there are questions that concern the widespread abuse of our freedom. Very recent work in evolutionary science offers us an important opportunity to look at our present problems from a different angle. This concerns the theme of ‘believing’. Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by signals, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; cultural systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning elements of further action.9 human belief, in essence, enables us to see what is not there and to act emphatically as though it was, so emphatically that what is absent is experienced. Human belief can result in the imposing of what does not exist on what does, in some cases so efficaciously that what did not exist comes to exist in the process. To date, we have no evidence that other species share this way of believing.10 belief is the most prominent, promising, and dangerous capacity that humanity has evolved. Belief is the ability to draw on our range of cognitive and social resources, our histories and experiences, and combine them with our imagination. It is the power to think beyond what is here and now and develop mental representations in order to see and feel and know something—an idea, a vision, a necessity, a possibility, a truth—that is not immediately present to the senses, and then to invest, wholly and authentically, in that ‘something’ so that it becomes one's reality … We are human, therefore we believe.11 Belief is the capacity to draw on our range of cognitive and social resources, histories, and experiences; combine them with our imagination; and think beyond the here and now to develop new mental representations. Belief is one of the things that gives humans world-transforming power. To believe in the possibility of a new settlement, a new type of society, or a new road to other places is necessary to enable humans to act in ways that can, in the long run, create new realities.13 Believing, then, is a fundamental feature of the human and, indeed, of our human belonging. It extensively defines who we are. We can say ‘to be human is to be able to believe’14 and ‘[T]o believe is to make a commitment’.15 We can also say that ‘a belief system is a particular pattern of collaborative information and commitment by a social group’.16 But believing can also open the door to fundamentalism, since ‘all fundamentalism is an abuse of the human capacity to believe’.17 It seems then that ‘belief’ and ‘belonging’ are key terms with respect to the human. But our human nature is such that we either belong to one another through the healthy renewal of our shared or complementary systems of believing, on the one hand, or some degree of fundamentalism intervenes on the other. With the latter, belief takes the form of blind assertion. Fundamentalism is the assertion of a social unity through the shared adoption of irrational features. It feeds on falsehood and mis-representation, under the guise of truth. But at its heart fundamentalism is hollowed-out community, without shared reasoning, and, crucially, with no more than a façade of belonging. We need, then, to ask by what process does our belonging happen? What shapes it? And here, frankly, we will have to acknowledge that we are the victims of history in a very profound sense. In 1839, Karl Hermann Scheidler coined the term ‘transcendence’ in dialectical opposition to ‘immanence’. ‘Transcendence’ here points to our capacity to escape the constraints of materiality altogether. The ‘law of efficient causation’ is an important element in Europe from the time of ancient Greece. But its role during the early Enlightenment is quite different. Mind transcends matter and matter is now understood to be that which resists the mind. What we see here, then, is a new kind of metaphysics, one which can only reliably rest upon the scientific principles of matter, from around the eighteenth century, with the flourishing of Mathematics. In the hands of the new science, the ‘law of efficient causation’ took on a very different meaning and it came to constitute a challenge to the very idea of human freedom. The response on the part largely of influential German philosophers was to insist that we can be free in our acts where we assert our freedom. This power of assertion was understood to elevate the human person above material causation. If matter now came to pose an extensive threat to our freedom through reductive materialism, then the integrity of the human person had to be defined through ‘transcendence’, as the dominant feature of our agency. It is this that was summarised in Scheidler's phrase. In the new Enlightenment environment of freedom through assertion, a vigorous type of dualism inevitably followed: mind and body were split apart. Although contested by the Romantics, through their religion and art, this would be a pervasive influence over at least two hundred years. Dualism (or a split within the human) became deeply embedded within Western culture, and it was taken for granted. This deeply slanted or ‘fissured’ our own self-understanding. Over time, however, it became increasingly evident that the real bastion of ‘transcendence’ was the belief that language is exclusively mind. Research in this area progressed and, in 2016, a fundamentally important study was published which concluded that mind and matter are continuous in language.18 In other words, what we need today is a non-reductive, ‘integrationist’ model which allows us to think of mind and matter as existing simultaneously (however mysteriously). It is no longer necessary to think of these in terms of the isolation of a self—now fully embodied in the world—or indeed in terms of a far-reaching imbalance or tension which disrupts our freedom. But the earlier binary opposition of ‘transcendence’ on the one hand and ‘matter’ on the other led to very significant consequences. The two active or indeed ‘performative’ types of freedom—as ‘theoretical’ reasoning on the one hand and as ‘practical’ reasoning on the other—came to predominate. In 1961, Emmanuel Levinas published a very influential book which identified the fusion of practical and theoretical reasoning, in the formation of what he termed a ‘totality’. In its orientation to performance and power, this ‘totality’ excluded or greatly diminished our social humanity. His work—Totality and Infinity—brings the concept of divinity into play in a way that recognises that the two performative or active forms of the self have in effect ‘fused’. Science and power have combined in the formation of a new imperium. Levinas's intention was now to call the power of this new imperium into question through the invocation of a contrasting divinity. But there is something critically missing here which Levinas could not have known at the time of writing. Without this ‘something’, harmony cannot be consolidated in ways that will allow Western civilisation to flourish. We might expect this to be very well known but, in fact, it scarcely figures. Freedom has been with us since we acquired the advanced language we speak today, from around 20,000 years ago. During the Neolithic period of some 10,000 years ago, advanced language must have played a key role in the shaping of the new extended Neolithic societies through ritual. Ritual—through rhythm and sound (and later script where calligraphy flourished)—remained the defining social form of the pre-modern world. It shaped our world religions. Ritual, then, and freedom intertwine. The freedom from of science and the freedom to of the act are both assertive forms of freedom. As noted, we have in effect experienced the fusion of our theoretical reasoning and our practical reasoning in ways which have proved very damaging in Western history. In fact, if we consider the pre-modern West and the Middle East, we can note that there was then a far greater mixing of cultures than we see today. In our modern West and Middle East, the tendency seems to be towards greater segregation, not least because of the appetite for power rather than social harmony, and its subtle layers of corruption. It is worth noting that towards the end of his life, Jacques Derrida cherished and celebrated the mix of cultures in medieval Europe which flourished in their diversity, under the guidance of the traditional schools of law.19 For Derrida, the richness of this diversity appears to have played a pivotal role in how he made sense of his life, as this was marked by Phenomenology, on the one hand, and now by the wholeness of diverse cultures in the other. The contrast between this and radicalised modern religions with their intolerance is clear, however. But what is it that is missing in modernity which was so abundantly present in the late medieval period? Let us return then to the theme of freedom for a moment. We should note that our theoretical freedom from and our practical freedom to both imply a quite different use of language on our part. The former—scientific freedom from—entails mathematical symbols, while the latter—our practical, act-based freedom to—entails the emotive patterns of persuasion we associate with rhetoric and politics. In light of this, it becomes increasingly clear that scientific freedom from and practical freedom to will always have a tendency to fuse, in line with Levinas's ‘totality’. How, then, can we build a bridge between where we are now, as inheritors of an age of ‘totalities’, and where we might hope to be: namely in a profoundly humanised world of liberating and civilised social values? The answer to this question will again entail an investigation of our history. History holds the key to advanced self-understanding in our own times. We have to be able to identify the vital presence of elements from the past, and from our remote past, which have the potential to cast invaluable light on who we have become and so too on how we can change ourselves and our world, perhaps even very rapidly. When we interact with another person, our brains and bodies are no longer isolated, but immersed in an environment with the other person, in which we become a coupled unit through a continuous moment-to-moment mutual adaptation of our own actions and the actions of the other.20 The social cognition system itself (both past and present) represents a space of unparalleled dynamic interactions, based upon responsive harmonisations, in the formation of strong and vital relationships between people. This so-called ‘participative sense-making’ supports both the exceptionally fast and dense pre-conscious neural networks on the one hand, and the self-possession, and self-awareness, of our advanced linguistic consciousness on the other. As human beings with advanced linguistic consciousness, we possess all the necessary levels of self-control and social productivity today, for building long-term human unity. The point at which we become aware of bonding is in the exchange of eye gaze and the emergence of a smile. These are very ancient indicators of strongly productive human sociality. But since we are conscious human beings, with power of choice, we can always choose whether we shall bond with this person or not. Where I do choose to bond with the other, by building upon the exchange of eye-gaze, I am effectively accelerating what is already a natural response. Instead of turning my gaze away, I become one with the flow of social bonding which is based in reciprocal signalling at very high speeds. We are now already building and extending society together. The smile constitutes a moment of openness when deep, and indeed ancient, harmonies break the surface. In the handshake or the reciprocal smile, we are already moving together into something which is recognisable as ritualised behaviour. This is based on the human body's own social language, to which—as modern human beings empowered with choice—we can consent. The reception of the other, in ritual-like encounters (with handshakes perhaps, repeating smiles, and alternating gaze), already constitutes in itself a kind of freedom. We allow the other to come close. They have the power of choice as we do. This is not an assertive freedom, however. It is rather the sociality of freedom. As such, it is highly socially productive in that ritual is the primary language of the human, from an evolutionary perspective. The gestures and movements associated with early ritual constitute the ‘first’ language of modern human beings, and are then taken forward into contemporary forms of communication.22 As individuals we will vary in the extent to which we retain access to these: the extent to which we can become sound, rhythm, or script. But we can see the communicative and bonding advantages of religious traditions. Even in Protestant forms of religion, which may often be associated with scepticism regarding ritual, sound is placed at the centre of traditions through congregational singing. What we are witnessing here, however, in the consent which grounds such ritual-like behaviours, is already in itself a highly productive form of freedom. Indeed, we can say that this is arguably the most fundamental form of our modern freedoms. Our freedom from and freedom to together generate modern human beings. These are the result of relatively recent evolutionary stages. But the extent to which these two forms of freedom are themselves humanised will nevertheless depend upon the extent to which the ancient social cognition system is simultaneously activated.23 How richly do we allow it to permeate our lives? Our freedom from and our freedom to both depend upon our prior freedom in, for their wholeness. But our freedom in is not a form of assertion; and still less is it the basis of a ‘totality’. It is rather that which lays the ground for the possibility that our assertive freedom from of science and freedom to of our action will be wholesome. And if they are not wholesome, then it is our native freedom in that has the potential to heal us, allowing wholeness to emerge. The theme of ‘belonging’, then, is itself integral to this wholeness. It is the form of our openness in the face of life. Only by being open towards others can we receive the other and so build community together. Openness conditions the ways in which we belong and it shapes the extent of our belonging. It is worth recalling, however, from an evolutionary point of view, that evidence for our own capacity to represent the human face is still very late indeed, perhaps from around 25,000 years ago.24 Human openness then is at the heart both of our fruitfulness and our survival. Unless we are sufficiently ‘open’, the society of which we are a part will be limited in its capacity to transmit openness and unmanageable levels of conflict may appear on the horizon. But we still need to ask: what exactly is openness? In the first place, openness is a condition of consciousness itself. We do not, generally, choose whether to be conscious or not. But when we are conscious, or awake, we can choose to increase the range of our openness, for instance. On the other hand, we might prefer to limit openness through choosing not to engage with someone else and their problems. Our openness is our capacity consciously to intervene. As we have seen with respect to ‘belief’, however, openness too is the possibility that we can realise something new in the flow of life which, in a definitively human way, is the actualisation of what was previously merely thought. Openness guides us to think that the other can be a potential partner, co-worker, or friend. Or, as Fuentes has it, openness is essential to the actualisation of the world through belief. We have to learn to remain open to the possibility of something new, something that is not yet actualised. At the same time, our openness can also be directed against others, who we may wish to control or exploit, or indeed who may wish to control or exploit us. Openness, then, can also be turned against itself. The task of this paper is to explore the possibility that we can find a theme which, from the point of view of the human, can function in a truly transformational way. This could be an image, or indeed a new way to address the reader, with transformational effects. It could be the concretisation or objectification of what otherwise only exists notionally, as an ‘idea in the head’. It could also be a new way of using the tools of Phenomenology. Indeed, it could be all of these things. What will be required, however, is a way out of the conundrum of being material human beings, whose consciousness—as we now know—is entirely grounded in the materiality of language, but who nevertheless think and feel, for reasons of history and culture, that we are not truly ‘of the earth’ in that way. There is in fact no other way of living our human truth. Naturally we have acquired a taste for ‘extensions’ and, sometimes, for amusing fictions. But we are where we are now. It is only in this ‘here and now’ of our immediate belonging in space and time that we can truly belong. Here we unfold as human beings into our own deeper living and belonging. In short, we really cannot leave the body behind; it is the manner and depth of our belonging in the world and so also—potentially—to one another. But it is also here that we must return to Phenomenology and its resources. A leading neurologist recently posed the question: ‘Where is the data of the in-between?’25 Shaun Gallagher had in mind the fact that scientific data exists for close personal relationships, on the one hand, and for large-scale social phenomena, on the other. But the sociality which exists in the span between these two, and which is by far the greater section of humanity, eludes cognitive analysis. Science does not ‘see’ the greater part of humanity. It can only retrieve workable data for relatively small groups, through ‘scaling down’, on the one hand, or for very large groups, or ‘scaling up’, on the other. But this does not mean, of course, that what we might tentatively call our ‘sociality of the middle’ is not there. On the contrary, it may be that we are not looking for it in the right way. We are all familiar with the power of society and the social, and its capacity to shape human experience. Can Phenomenology help us then to see our seemingly missing ‘in-between’ sociality by pointing to its effects? Is it possible, for instance, that something much bigger is present at the ‘mid-point’ between human beings, which we cannot see but we can in fact feel? After all, the theme of ritual reappears here, which has been such a powerfully expansionist, large-scale phenomenon during our evolutionary life-time. In ritual or ritual-like behaviour, our sociality is grounded in the moment which precedes the separation of identities through layers of consciousness. As self-aware persons, with advanced linguistic consciousness, we are grounded, through ritual, in the harmonic sounds and shapes of words. And it is the material properties of language that form the bedrock of the higher-level self-awareness that we all share. But here, too, we must take stock of the limits of the phenomenological method. Phenomenology is hard work. A demanding recursivity is frequently in play here, as we scrutinise others, and ourselves, at ever higher levels of attention. Of course, the tools that we use are not those of everyday thinking. They represent rather higher levels of self-scrutiny, on the one hand, and of cognitive openness on the other. And, like any other critically reflective method, Phenomenology has to observe itself openly, which is to say in ways that are potentially new. The phenomenological method also has to allow the emergence of new insights, which may be generated by our changing histories. Critically, above all, there has to be space for recognising the ‘scientific’ element in phenomenological practices. The lessons of history are that significant periods of change tend to be bound up with newly discovered scientific principles. In this paper we have sought to open up a question: are we now at a turning point? What is the relation, for instance, between mind and embodiment, in the light of the new discovery of their fundamental, though also entirely non-reductive, ‘oneness’? The pressing question is whether there exists today, at the heart of the phenomenological project, a discernible ‘turn to materiality’—as re-integration into material form—and if it is this which manifests as what we can call ‘birthing’, or being more manifestly human. Perhaps we cannot see the unity of mind and body then, for it exists within but also beyond the human face. We can only experience it.