Evolution of Consciousness

Beyond Flatland

The evolution of human consciousness extends through magic, mythic, and rational stages or worldviews which produces different self-identity, needs, and moral senses that are biocentric, egocentric, ethnocentric, and worldcentric, the platform for all higher and truly spiritual development. The four higher stages (transpersonal) are psychic, subtle, causal, and nondual., with nature mysticism, deity mysticism, formless mysticism, and nondual mysticism. These higher stages are very rare, very difficult accomplishments. In the past, they were reached only by a small handful: the lone shaman, the yogi in the cave, and the true seekers of wisdom. These deeper or higher states have never been anything near an average or collective mode of awareness. (223).

The worldview of scientific materialism, which is the "official" worldview of the modern West, aggressively denies not only the higher stages of consciousness development but the existence of consciousness itself. The only thing that is ultimately real is frisky dirt. Flatland. This is reductionism that denies interior reality: there is no consciousness, no mind, no soul, no spirit, no value, no depth, and no divinity found anywhere. Only a great web of interwoven "its", a truly insane worldview.  (224).

Empirical science, and science alone could pronounce on ultimate reality. Science became scientism, which means it didn't just pursue its own truths, it aggressively denied that there were any other truths at all. (240). The external it-domain of industry and science grew like cancer, a pathological hierarchy, invading and colonizing and dominating the internal and morality domains. Science and technical solutions would solve everything.  (242). Scientific materialism dominates and tyrannizes the modern and postmodern world. Ego is all that is left of the interior domains, and even its existence was challenged.  Never in history had nature simply been equated with the ultimate reality. where nature alone is real.  Spirit is denied altogether or nature is claimed as spirit. This is the industrial ontology: "empirical nature alone is real."This idea invades and colonizes and dominates the other domains. This is a disaster. Like a battered victim, people fall in love with their captors, rejecting superficial problems of industrialization while embracing the deeper philosophy. (252).

Plato, Plotinus, Emerson, Eckhart, Lady Tsogyal, and others say how nature is an expression of Spirit. Spirit transcends and includes both mind and nature.  The ecocrisis is the dissociation and lack of integration of nature with consciousness, morals, mind, and culture. The path for earth-saving is interior development and evolution of consciousness.  (254) The evolution of Spirit is the emergence of a Nature or Spirit (or World Soul) that unifies mind and nature, culture and nature.

The rational Ego camp has a desire to control and subdue the world of nature. The life in nature was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, and quite amoral. The rational Ego brought us a disenchanted world.  The Eco-camp of Rousseau, Schiller, Wordworth, and Whitman rebelled, introducing wholeness, harmony, and union between self and world. (256). But they were still enthralled with sensory nature. Transcendential idealism—Kant, Schelling, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger (plus Fichte, Holderlin, Bradley, Husserl)—engaged in an heroic battle with the trolls.  (259), but failed to integrate science, ethics and art. The wild, fabulous, amazing, and extraordinary attempt at re-enchantment had finally begun. The crucial problem and dilemma is how to reconcile the necessity to rise above nature (Ascent) with a necessity to become one with it (Descent).  (261)

You might stare for hours at a sunset and suddenly disappear into the World Soul and feel yourself at one with all nature. This is well and good, but nature is not the source of this Beauty. The source is transcendental Spirit, of which nature is a radiant expression. Beauty that takes your breath away, takes your self away—a beauty that bestows new splendor on the setting sun. If you are committed to interpreting this spiritual experience through industrial scientism, you ascribe this Spirit to simple nature itself. You mistaken reduce Spirit to sensory nature and sensory impact.  (267).

Evolution is on its way to a conscious apprehension of Spirit as true Self. You look within. The story of the growth and evolution of consciousness itself is interior growth which also includes the Ego and Eco, the interiors and exteriors. Ecological wisdom is not about understanding how to live in accord with nature; it consists in understanding how to get humans to agree on how to live in accord with nature. This wisdom is an intersubjective accord in the noosphere, not an immersion in the biosphere. It's not on the exterior surfaces, it's a path of intersubjective accord based upon mutual understanding grounded in sincerity. But the Ego camps' repression and regression are the twin engines of the flatland game, the machines of industrial philosophy. (268).

The Dominance of the Descenders

We must go forward beyond reason in order to discover that mind and nature are both simply different movements of one absolute Spirit, a Spirit that manifests itself in its own successive stages of unfolding. Hegel writes how Spirit is not One apart from Many, but the very process of the One expressing itself through the Many—it is infinite activity expressing itself in the process of development itself, or as we would say, Spirit expresses itself in the entire process of evolution.

Moderns are committed to a Descended grid and have no higher stages of evolution beyond reason, enterpreting reality in merely empirical and natural terms, which is why people can't understand or explain self-transcending drives of evolution that have nonetheless become our modern god. (273)

Hegel says how the Absolute is "the process of its own becoming; it becomes concrete or actual only by its development. . . The history of the world is this process of development and realization of Spirit—only this insight can reconcile Spirit with the history of the world—what has happened, and is happening every day, is not only not 'without God', but is essentially God's work."  (276). Spirit descends into manifestation, but this manifestation is nevertheless Spirit itself, a form or expression of Spirit itself. 

At this point in evolution Spirit is still not self-conscious. Thus the whole of nature is a slumbering Spirit. Nature is not a mere inert backdrop but a self-organizing dynamic system and the objective manifestation of Spirit—precisely Plato's "visible, sensible God."  (277).

There was a failure to develop a truly contemplative practice—a true paradigm, a reproducible exemplar, an actual transpersonal practice: a yoga, a meditative discipline, an experimental methodology to reproduce in consciousness the transpersonal insights and intuitions.  There must be interior technologies to change the mapmaker and not simply to merely map the world. There must be a yoga, a transpersonal practice to reproduce the insights and awareness in a practicing community. (281). There must be a dependable practie for the developmental unfolding of the higher stags of consciousness. A practice and methodology, a meditation that allows one to ground intuitions in experiential, public, reproducible, fallibilistic criteria. The Idealists like Hegel had none of this. (282).

The environmental problem is not industrialization or climate change. It's the lack of mutual understanding and mutual agreement in the noosphere about how to proceed with those problems. We cannot rein in industry if we cannot reach mutual understanding and mutual agreement based on a worldcentric moral perspective concerning the global commons. And we reach that worldcentric moral perspective through a difficult and laborious process of interior growth and transcendence. In short, global problems demand global consciousness, and global consciousness is the product of five or six major interior stages of development. A map will not do it. Interior growth and transcendence will do it.  (285).

An Integral Vision

One might have an experience or intuition of cosmic consciousness but if one interprets this solely in terms of finding a higher Self then one thinks all other problems will simply work themselves out. The pure Self will solve everything idea ignores the behavioral, social, and cultural components that are also necessary for transformation. This is very narcissistic—find my true Self and the world will take care of itself.  (286)

One can become one with Spirit and the great immanent system only by a laborious process of inner transcendence which involves many stages of development. 

The "Higher Self" camp is notoriously immune to social concerns. Thinking that Self is responsible for everything that happens is totally disengaged Ego gone horribly amuck in omnipotent self-only fantasies. This simply represses the networks of rich social and cultural communions that are just as important as agency in constituting the manifestation of Spirit.  The idea is that if I can just contact my Higher Self, then everything else will take care of itself. But this fails to see that Spirit manifests not only as inner consciousness but also community with social and cultural foundations. Contacting the Higher Self is not the end of all problems but the beginning of the immense and difficult new work to be done in all spheres. (288).

You don't create your own reality; psychotics create their own reality. The point is that a genuinely spiritual Self does manifest its own reality. Everything is God, not just your own particular awareness. If you interpret spiritual awareness merely as a Higher Self, then you ignore the cultural and social and behavioral work that desperately needs to be done in those domains in order to fully express the Spirit that you are. (289)

The more you contact the Higher Self, the more you worry about the world, as a component of your very Self, the Self of each and all. Emptiness is Form. Brahman is the World. To finally contact Brahman is to ultimately engage the World. If you really contact your Higher Self you work in the community sphere to help manifest this realization, and treat each and every being as a manifestation of the Divine. With the supreme identity, you are established in radical Freedom and that Freedom manifests as compassionate activity, as agonizing concern. The Form of Freedom is sorrow, unrelenting worry for those struggling to awaking. The Bodhisattva weeps daily; the tears stain the very fabric of the cosmos in all directions.

If you interpret Spirit as simply a higher or sacred Self, ignoring Spirit in other spheres, then that will abort further realization. It will profoundly sabotage your own spiritual development and cut off further realizations Spirit's all-pervading presence. You will keep retreating into your interior awareness.

Deeper intuitions touching the I, We, and It domains: not just how to realize the higher Self, but how to see it embraced in culture, embodied in nature, and embedded in social institutions.  Realized, embraced, embodied, embedded: a graceful interpretation of Spirit manifesting in all spheres that facilitates the birth of that Spirit. Graceful interpretation midwifes Spirit's birth, Spirit's descent.  (290).

The mythic God is killed but Spirit is the overall process. Reason has more depth than myhtology and represents a further unfolding of Spirit's own potentials. The rational denial of God contains more Spirit than the mythic affirmation of God.

Every great epoch of human evolution seems to have one central idea that dominates the entire ephoch and summarizes its approach to Spirit and cosmos: (295)

• Foraging: Spirit is interwoven with earthbody. The very earth is our blood and bones and we are all sons and daughters of that earth. Spirit flows freely
• Horticulture: Spirit demands sacrifice. Sacrifice is the great theme, not just in the concrete form of actual ritual sacrifice but the pervading notion is that certain specific human steps must be taken to come into accord with Spirit. Ordinary or typical humanity has to get out of the way—has to be sacrificed—in order for Spirit to shine forth more clearly. There are steps on the way to a more fully realized Spiritual awareness.
• Agrarian: These spiritual steps are in fact arrayed in a Great Chain of Being. This is the central, dominant, inescapable theme of every mythic-agrarian society the world over with few exceptions. And since most of "civilized history" has been agrarian history, this is the dominant idea in most civilized culture. 
• Modernity: The Great Chain unfolds in evolutionary time. Spirit was usually left out of the evolution equation is the disaster of modernity, not the dignity. Evolution is the one great background concept. 
• Postmodernity: Nothing is pregiven; the world is not just a perception but also an interpretation. Spirit becomes self-conscious on the way to its own superconscious shock.

World Transformation and the Culture Gap

There is a major world transformation now in progress. Haltingly, jerkily, in fits and starts. We are right on the edge of one of the half-dozen or so major, profound, worldwide transformations in the formation of the human species. These are often simplified to three major transformations—farming, industry, information—so that today is the beginning of the "third wave." This transformation is being driven by a new techno-economic base (informational), but it also brings with it a new worldview, with a new mode of self and new intentional and behavioral patterns, set in a new cultural worldspace with new social institutions as anchors.  This is a very tall order. The emergent and transformative development brings new demands and new responsibilities: the higher must be integrated with the lower. Transcend and include.  (297)

One of the major problems is the gap between the rich and the poor. This is true. But this is merely quantified as a money gap. And as alarming as that exterior gap between individuals is, there is a more worrisome gap—an interior gap, a culture gap, a gap in consciousness. The economic gap is bad enough but there is a much more crucial and much more hidden culture gap or values gap.  And there are more individuals who can be left behind, marginalized, excluded from their own intrinsic unfolding, disadvantaged in the cruelest way of all: in their own interior consciousness, value, and worth.

This massive problem of the culture gap cannot be solved in flatland terms because flatland denies the existence of interior transformation and transcendence altogether, denies the development of consciousness, which is truly part of a culture's human capital but not on the flatland ledgers. (299).

The culture gap problem is the same exact problem as the environmental crisis. 

Egocentric people couldn't care less about the global commons unless you scare them into seeing merely how it affects their own narcissistic existence, whereupon you have simply reinforced exactly the self-centric survival motives that are the cause of the problem. in the first place. You just reinforce all of that with ecological scare tactics. It is at a global, postconventional, worldcentric stance that individuals can recognize the global dimensions of the environmental crisis and, more important, possess the moral vision and moral fortitude to proceed on a global basis. Obviously, then, a significant number of individuals must reach this level of development in order to be a significant force in global care and ecological reform.  (300)

Axiology is a theory of values and there are four broad schools of environmental axiology: bioequality (all animals and living beings are equal), animal rights (rights are extended to animals based on sentience), hierarchical (more rights are afforded to more complex entities, but not to plunder other living beings), and stewardship (humans alone have rights, but this includes the care and stewardship for earth. Similarly, all things have Ground value: all are expressions of the Divine Absolute. And things have intrinsic value in itself as a whole (with more value the more consciousness it has) and extrinsic value (as a part of a whole, with a value for others). 

Responsibilities are simply a description of the conditions that any being must meet in order to be a part of the whole. If it doesn't meet those responsibilities then it cannot sustain its functional fit with the whole, so it is ejected or destroys the whole itself. If the responsibilities are not met, then it ceases to be a part of the whole. Responsibilities express the conditions necessary to sustain its partness, sustain its communion.  It's not that it would be nice if we met these responsibilities; it is a condition of existence.   (303). 

A pragmatic rule of thumb for environmental ethics is: in pursuit of our vital needs, consume or destroy as little as possible. Do the least amount of harm to consciousness as you possibly can. Put in its positive form: protect and promote as much as possible. Implement the Spiritual unfolding in as many beings as possible. 

A new form of society will have to evolve that integrates consciousness, culture, and nature, and thus finds room for art, morals, and science—for personal values, collective wisdom, and technical know-how. There is no way to do this without going beyond flatland, only rejecting flatland to arrive at an authentic environmental ethics and a council of all beings, coming to terms with the devastating culture gap, setting individuals free to unfold their own deepest possibilities in a culture of encouragement. 

The Ascending and Descending currents are brought into harmony and union so that both wisdom and compassion can join hands. All of the worlds beings are embraced with infinite love and compassion, and care and concern.  (308). 

An all-level, all-quadrant approach has immediate applications in business, education, medicine,health care, politics, cultural studies, psychology, human development—the list is truly endless. In medicine, for example, you can see that any effective care would have to take into account not just the objective medicine or physical treatment that you give the person (UR), but also the person's subjective beliefs and expectations (UL), the cultural attitudes, hopes, and fears and about sickness (LL), and the social institutions, economic factors, and access to health care (LR), all of which have a causal effect on the course of a person's illness. You can do the same analysis with law, education, business, politics, environmental ethics, schools of feminism, prison reform, philosophical systems, and so on. And this will pay off in the most concrete of ways. Any health care system that includes all of them will be more effective and therefore more cost efficient. Business will be more efficient and profitable, education will be more effective, politics will be more responsive, spirituality will be more transformative, and so on.

Source: Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything (2001).

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