The Evolution of Consciousness
In the history of the collective as in the history of the individual,
everything depends on the development of consciousness.
—Carl Jung 186
THE BATTLE OVER EVOLUTION
Ninety-nine percent of all the species that have lived on earth have died away, and no stars will wink out in tribute if we in our folly soon join them.
—Timothy Ferris 91
Biological Evolution
The nature, in fact the very existence, of evolution is one of the great cultural battlegrounds of our time. Based on a literal reading of religious texts, creationists denounce it and proclaim that God created the world as it is, all at once. “The world was created on 22nd October, 4004 BC at 6 o’clock in the evening,” concluded a seventeenth-century bishop.258 Not so, declared Dr. John Lightfoot, Vice Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, who in 1859 corrected the good bishop and put creation back fifteen hours to 9 AM on the 23rd of October, 4004 BC.258
Scientists disagree. Based on a reading of geological, archeological, and biological information, scientists regard evolution as one of their greatest and most triumphant theories. The physician Lewis Thomas called it “our most powerful story.”366
A further battle turns on the interpretation of evolution. Many scientists argue that it is the result of mere chance, a random mutation and weeding of genes in a vast conflict of natural selection. Humans, concludes Richard Dawkins, are “survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”63 Though this is often presented as a simple fact, Stan Grof points out:
The probability that human intelligence developed all the way from the chemical ooze of the primeval ocean solely through sequences of random mechanical processes has been recently aptly compared to the probability of a tornado blowing through a gigantic junkyard and assembling by accident a 747 jumbo jet. This highly improbable assumption is a metaphysical statement that cannot be proved by existing scientific methods. Far from being a scientific piece of information—as its proponents so fiercely maintain—it is, in the present state of knowledge, little more than one of the leading myths of Western science.130
Has Consciousness Evolved?
So the nature of biological evolution is fiercely debated. What about the evolution of consciousness, which in some ways is even more complex, being molded by both biology and culture? There are four main views of the evolution of consciousness (both human conscious in general and religious consciousness in particular). Historically, these have usually been considered together, so we can start there.
The first view sees history as a cyclical affair of recurrent ups and downs. The second is a downhill view that sees things as getting worse and consciousness as devolving. The third sees no change in consciousness, or at least religious consciousness, since prehistoric times. The fourth is an upward view of progressivism that sees culture and consciousness as evolving. Let’s examine these four more closely.
In many cultures, time was seen as a ceaseless cycle of days and nights, light and dark, creation and destruction, in which humankind and consciousness repetitively regenerate and degenerate. Our current time is often regarded as a degenerate phase, and this merges into the second view, that the human condition and consciousness have devolved. Devolving myths describe a prehistoric golden age and a subsequent fall from grace. In the Western monotheisms, it is the story of the Garden of Eden and our subsequent eviction. In China it is the age of virtue and subsequent decline; and in Hinduism it is the fall from the satya-yuga, a golden era of righteousness and wisdom, into our present kali-yuga, a time of viciousness and ignorance. Contemporary scholars usually consider such ideas as purely mythological, although a few respected thinkers have considered decline as a possibility.346
The third idea holds that there has been no significant change in human consciousness, or at least in religious consciousness. From this perspective, the earliest spiritual practitioners were on a par with the latest, prehistoric realizations were as deep as contemporary ones, and ancient shamans enjoyed the same experiences and states as recent mystics. Such ideas are implied by such notable scholars as Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, and Carl Jung. In Eliade’s words, “As for the ‘inner light’ which plays a part of the first importance in Indian mysticism and metaphysics as well as in Christian mystical theology, it is, as we have seen, already documented in Eskimo shamanism.”83
This theme is now echoed among popularizers of shamanism. To these people, shamanic experiences are on a par with, or even greater than, those of mystics of later traditions. This represents an example of a popular but questionable view that all spiritual practices lead to the same mystical endpoint: they are all just different roads up the same mountain.
Some of the more sophisticated popularizers of this idea use the language of states of consciousness to claim equivalence. We have already noted claims that “shamans, yogis and Buddhists alike are accessing the same state of consciousness”75 and that the shaman “experiences existential unity—the samadhi of the Hindu’s or what Western spiritualists and mystics call enlightenment illumination, unio mystica.”189 However, we have also seen that careful comparisons reveal these states to be very different.
EVOLVING CONSCIOUSNESS
The fourth view sees human consciousness as a work in progress. For luminaries such as Hegel, Aurobindo, Teilhard de Chardin, Jean Gebser, and Ken Wilber, human consciousness and religious consciousness have evolved. Fortunately we can focus on the narrower yet still extremely complex area of religious consciousness, and since Ken Wilber has synthesized the ideas of so many thinkers, we can draw especially on his ideas.
Wilber draws a crucial distinction between the “average mode” of religious consciousness and the “leading edge.”408 Leading-edge pioneers break through into new states of consciousness and then leave descriptions and instructions whereby others can follow them.
Wilber’s division of spiritual states into four broad classes of gross, subtle, causal, and nondual is helpful. He suggests that just as these tend to emerge sequentially in today’s contemplatives, so too did they emerge in history, and a survey of historical religious texts supports him.
Humankind’s first gross and subtle spiritual experiences are long lost in the dawn of prehistory. Reliable signs of the causal appeared in the first few centuries before the Common Era and are associated with, for example, the Upanishads, the Buddha, early Taoists, and later with Jesus.408 Such was the extraordinary impact of this breakthrough and the sages who made it that this era is known as the Axial age. Signs of the nondual appear a few centuries into the Common Era and are associated with, for example, the appearance of tantra and with names such as Plotinus in Rome, Bodhidharma in China, and Padmasambhava in Tibet.
Where do shamans fit in this evolutionary ascent? Wilber places them at the beginning of this vast process and regards them as the first spiritual heroes. Though they may occasionally have broken through into the causal and nondual, both their mythology and technology were clearly aimed at eliciting and utilizing specific gross and subtle states.
For thousands or tens of thousands of years, shamans practiced at the leading edge of human consciousness. For it was only millennia later that technologies emerged to awaken the causal and nondual, and the evolution of religious consciousness is intimately tied to the evolution of the technology of transcendence.391 There has been an enormous development of transformational techniques since some early human first discovered that hitting a stretched skin created a resounding sound, and hitting it repeatedly produced curious and pleasurable experiences. Shamans presumably remembered and recreated such discoveries, welded them into an effective collection of techniques, and then transmitted them across generations. Millennia later, early sages refined shamanic technology, added their own yogic, contemplative, and tantric techniques, and thereby created technologies that unveiled causal and nondual realizations. Subsequently, religions, philosophies, and psychologies arose to express and analyze these realizations, and their cumulative impact on human culture and consciousness is inestimable.
THE RELATIVE DIFFICULTIES OF DIFFERENT REALIZATIONS
The consciousness of each of us is evolution
looking at itself and reflecting upon itself.
—Teilhard de Chardin 363
Different states emerge with different ease. Anyone can be graced with a spontaneous taste of any state. However, voluntarily inducing spiritual states is another matter, and stabilizing them is even more so.
A crucial question is, how many practitioners actually attain the realizations aimed for by different traditions? We have some hints but very little firm data. These hints suggest that it may be easier to attain shamanic realization than the goals of later traditions.
For example, Michael Harner reports that in workshops, some 90 percent are able to begin shamanic journeys.148 Of course, there is a huge difference between initial insights and spiritual mastery. However, in later traditions the general sense is that among, for example, Christian contemplatives, Indian yogis, or Buddhist meditators, significant gains can take considerable time, though of course grace can occur at any time.
Nevertheless, there does seem to be a relationship between a state and its ease of access. In general, the “higher” the state, the later it may emerge both in individuals and in history, the more training it may demand, and the smaller the percentage of practitioners who realize it. Shamanism was the earliest tradition to emerge, and it allows relatively easy access to its altered states, a fact that may partly account for its current popularity in the West. Shamanism continues to offer today what it has offered for hundreds of thousands of yesterdays; namely, a relatively rapid means, and for most of human history perhaps the only means, of controlled transcendence. As such, shamans can be considered as the founders of the “great tradition”: the sum total of humankind’s religious-spiritual wisdom.105