O, what a world of unseen visions and heard silences, this insubstantial country of the mind! . . . An introcosm that is more myself than anything I can find in a mirror. This consciousness that is myself of selves, that is everything, and yet is nothing at all—what is it? And where did it come from? And why?
—Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind
Gong . . . Gong . . . Gong. The church bells rang out through the crisp morning air on the top of the sacred mountain. The sun had just risen over the distinctive jagged cliffs of Montserrat, Spain, and this venerable alarm clock heralded the arrival of the new day, calling the pilgrims to work and worship. But I needed no rousing. The bells seemed to ring inside my body, reverberating back and forth within my consciousness. I was sitting upright, perfectly still, meditating quietly as the first rays of sun fell on the ancient streets. I was in the middle of a ten-day retreat being held next to the cathedral at this pilgrimage site.
There is nothing like doing nothing to make one appreciate the mystery of consciousness. A soundless thought appeared in my mind like a water bubble rising in the vast ocean. Slowly, silently, it drifted away, faded into the distance, and the inner ocean was again calm. And for a moment, “ocean” was the right word, as my interior world seemed vast, spacious, all-encompassing. In fact, it didn’t seem to be inside me at all; I seemed to be inside it.
I wasn’t alone in my quiet reverie. All around the large hall were men and women of various ages and backgrounds, sitting in quiet attention, their focus turned inward, their bodies still. Meditating each day with two hundred others, one discovers a unique kind of camaraderie and intimacy, one that has nothing to do with the diversion of idle talk, the clash and confluence of personalities, or the intensity of shared emotions. In those hours of stillness, boundaries and barriers begin to fade, and it can feel temporarily as if two hundred people are sharing one meditative field, a singular interior consciousness. In the deepest meditations of that retreat, I can remember thoughts arising, and for a moment, having no idea if a particular bubble in this vast internal sea was actually my thought or someone else’s.
Later each day, as the sun would make its journey down the backside of this “serrated” mountain, I would hike upward, following the steep paths to the high walkways that ringed the upper peaks. Here and there, small temples and shrines, one-time shelters for reclusive monks, dotted the stark but beautiful landscape. Religious pilgrims had been contemplating God on these hillsides since the twelfth century. On those rugged slopes, overlooking the Catalan countryside, I would think about consciousness.
Questions as to the origins and meaning of consciousness seem to be increasingly common today. It is as if more and more people on both sides of the science and spirit fence are trying to upgrade our understanding of what this inner dimension is all about. Scientists seem to have noticed that there is nothing in the existing account of our origin story that easily explains the mysteries that lie in the mind of the human. As Robert Wright has pointed out, “While I think natural selection provides a satisfactory account for [evolution], I do think there is still one massive mystery, and that is why consciousness, or sentience, exists at all, why there is subjective experience. And I don’t think many evolutionary biologists appreciate the depth of that mystery.” It is that remarkable mystery that has inspired a new generation of theorists and researchers to rev up their fMRI machines and CT scans at labs around the country, hoping that better scans of the material brain will give us hints as to the workings of the mind. But even as science begins to ask questions once considered immaterial, both literally and figuratively, something else is happening as well. Many spiritually inclined theorists are questioning previous assumptions and looking past the magical, mythical, and mystical shrouds that so long have obscured this fundamental subject.
Sages and mystics for centuries have claimed that the inner dimension of consciousness is, in fact, more real than even the most tangible physical objects of the external world, and past philosophical movements, going all the way back to the early Greeks, have certainly entertained all kinds of notions as to what might be the significance of human self-reflective awareness. But more often than not, theologians have reflected on the divine origins of consciousness, scientists on the material origins of the brain, and philosophers have sort of bounced uncomfortably between them.
As I walked along the narrow mountain pathways, a strong wind whipped across my face, carrying with it a fast-moving fog that little by little encircled the peaks and raced down the hillsides. I thought about Henri Bergson’s statement that consciousness is the “motive principle of evolution.” Just as I could see the fog racing down the face of the mountain, but could not see the true source of its mobility, the wind that carried it forward, so Bergson thought that life and matter are, like the fog, borne up by the current of consciousness itself, caught in the great evolutionary blast of this vital but invisible creative force. To conclude that matter is the sole evolutionary engine, he suggested, is to make the mistake of assuming that clouds somehow are moving by themselves, when in fact, clouds, air currents, and condensation are all integral to one system, some of it seen, some of it unseen.
In the silence of retreat and meditation, it is this unseen dimension that moves to the forefront of awareness. One becomes aware of just how profound it is that human beings possess this interior space, this inner world. Consciousness becomes less a taken-for-granted backdrop to the ongoing drama of life and more a living presence, rich with an expanded sense of depth, meaning, and significance. We live in a culture focused largely on external image and surface concerns, and for that moment at least, as I walked the rocky pathways where Benedictine monks had once wandered in search of spiritual solitude, it was a relief to have the freedom to give the interior dimensions the attention they well deserve.
“The space you discover in meditation is not just a quiet place inside your own head,” remarked Andrew Cohen, the spiritual teacher who was leading this retreat, the evening before. “It’s a dimension of reality itself—a dimension of the cosmos. It’s the interior of the cosmos. The interior of the cosmos is not the inside of that mountain—that’s still the exterior dimension. The interior of the cosmos is your experience of consciousness. The exterior of the cosmos is matter. It’s what we see all around us, and what we can see if we look through a telescope—apparently we can see back to the earliest beginnings of our material universe. But the interior dimension is consciousness. The cosmos is not just ‘out there’; it’s ‘in here.’ ”
What Cohen was sharing with us was a relatively new way of looking at the experience of consciousness, one that cuts through some of the philosophical complexity surrounding the issue and connects it to the reality of an evolving world. Whereas ancient mystic seers may have meditated on the inner depths of formless, timeless consciousness-without-an-object and declared that “only that is real” and contemporary scientists may prefer to contemplate the more prosaic pathways of matter and declare that only that is real, I prefer to take a “both/and” approach to this ancient conundrum. Yes, the interior, subjective world is quite real. Consciousness exists as a living truth of our own inner experience, but it is not some alternate substance operating completely independent of the physical universe, as Descartes once thought. Rather, it is the interior dimension of the cosmos, a nonphysical side of the physical coin, so to speak. The interior and the exterior, consciousness and matter, cannot be separated, this perspective suggests. This internal cosmos, this world of awareness, subjectivity, perceptions, ideas, emotions, and so on, is not an unimportant sideshow in the cosmic drama, a simple shadow effect of the neurons in our brain, but a legitimate part of reality, knit into the ontological fabric of a universe (or multiverse?) that may yet prove more remarkable than even the most wide-eyed theorists over in the physics department have yet surmised.
In truth, “consciousness” is probably a clumsy word for this internal universe, a blanket term that tends to paint with one brushstroke a canvas that has much more subtlety to it. For example, there is what has been called “pure consciousness” or the experience of awareness itself, the consciousness of mystical meditation, also referred to as “consciousness without an object,” “primordial consciousness,” as Buddhists have called it, or the “ground of being,” a term popularized by theologian Paul Tillich.3 And then there are internal thoughts, psychological structures, emotions, values, convictions, etc., that we also associate with this internal world. And that’s just the beginning. If the Eskimos, as legend tells, have twenty words for “snow,” perhaps one day, in a more enlightened age, we’ll have twenty names that will more accurately distinguish the different dimensions of the internal universe. But for now, one will have to suffice.
An evolutionary worldview offers at least two critical insights when it comes to consciousness. First, consciousness evolves.4 The internal universe, like almost all other aspects of reality when seen from an evolutionary perspective, is not static. It is not fixed. It is not set in stone, either by an Abrahamic God or a genetic code. Evolution is happening in this dimension as well. The self develops and evolves. Human consciousness develops and evolves. Evolution, in this way of looking at things, cannot be reduced to the physical world, to the changing synapses deep in the structures of the brain. It is also occurring deep in the interior dimensions of our subjective lives.
The second insight is perhaps even more important. It’s not just our personal subjective universe that evolves. It’s also our shared internal lives, our collective interior. As I experienced on that retreat, consciousness is not merely a private affair, a personal, sealed inner container of subjectivity. That is a false way to think about this interior dimension. To some extent, we share the internal universe with others. When I am meditating on a beautiful mountaintop in Spain with two hundred others, we are not just experiencing two hundred separate inner worlds. We are participating in a collective field of consciousness—not a subjective but an inter-subjective experience. And this intersubjective space, which can become more heightened in a setting like that retreat, is in fact a dimension that exists all the time, independent of any particular experience.
Put most simply, this intersubjective dimension is culture. Often when we use the term “culture,” we think of its many outward expressions—music, art, fashion, or social and political institutions. But another way to think about culture is to see it as a dimension that exists inside of us—the interior of the collective. Author Jean Houston describes it as the “living tissue of shared experience.” It is where meaning, values, and agreements live—a real, internal world that is, I will propose, part of the evolutionary dynamics of the universe. We have spent a fair amount of time in this book discussing the topic of worldviews—their reality, their influence, and their importance for understanding culture. Recognizing the existence of this intersubjective dimension allows us to take that understanding deeper—to see the actual “place” in which worldviews form and develop. After all, a worldview is a collection of shared values, beliefs, and agreements, and where do these cultural constellations live if not in the inner space between us?
In our materialist society, where many people have a hard time even acknowledging the legitimacy of subjective consciousness, much less the reality of this relatively new concept called intersubjective consciousness, such assertions require us to step out of our usual patterns of thinking. They ask us to embrace the possibility that there may be more going on beneath the surface of society, in the subterranean corridors of our collective consciousness, than we previously realized. As we shall see, there are few distinctions in this book that are more important or more useful when it comes to appreciating the new perspective of an evolutionary worldview.
In this book, up till now, we’ve been primarily exploring the more conventional manifestations of the evolutionary process—the development of technology, social complexity, cooperative arrangements, novelty, and so on. In the chapters that follow, I’ll be traveling off the beaten path and examining what evolution looks like when we turn our attention to the interior domains of consciousness and culture. Currently, this is more the domain of philosophy than science, but as we will see, the evolutionary principles that are being revealed in this inner dimension are remarkably congruent with those being mapped by scientists in the exterior world. As guides in this intangible territory, I will be drawing on the work of a number of individuals who have been central to ongoing efforts to re-contextualize both consciousness and culture in an evolutionary light.
PHILOSOPHY AND THE NOOSPHERE
When I returned that year from my Spanish mountaintop sojourn, I was refreshed and inspired. Without a doubt, my spiritual immersion in the interior world of consciousness had deepened considerably during my retreat, but little did I know that my own philosophical understanding of the terrain was about to take a leap forward as well. The catalyst for that leap was the manuscript of a book I had recently received—Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution by Steve McIntosh, a man who would prove to be an astute guide to the dynamics of what he called “the internal universe.”
McIntosh is the founder of Now & Zen, a small business in Boulder, Colorado, that has been a modest success selling highly crafted “Zen Alarm Clocks” for the last couple of decades. Originally educated as an attorney, he attended the highly prestigious University of Virginia, where he trained his mind in the ways of the law and contemplated the works of the great founder of the University, Thomas Jefferson. There, along the beautiful walkways that Jefferson himself had helped design, McIntosh considered the great achievements of our founding fathers. He gained a deeper appreciation for how they had taken the new worldview of modernism that was just beginning to become established in eighteenth-century culture and applied it to governance, helping to create the first nation built from the ground up on Enlightenment philosophy. Decades later, it was his continuing interest in politics that led to our initial conversations—I was researching an article about his efforts to generate interest in a new kind of global governance. As soon as we got on the phone together, the effect was like a spark plug firing. There was an instant connection that would turn brief phone calls into multihour-long philosophical explorations. And it was in those conversations that I began to understand more directly the relationship between ephemeral things like consciousness and practical things like politics.
“We might say that every problem in the world today is first and foremost a problem of consciousness,” McIntosh explained to me in our first call, “and every solution involves the raising of consciousness.” Now, don’t get the wrong idea. By “the raising of consciousness,” McIntosh didn’t mean sitting around campfires in encounter groups exploring our feelings. No, he was talking about the actual evolution of the “internal universe,” as he called it, the development of our shared values and worldviews. After all, so many of the problems of our world are, as we have discussed, problems of worldviews—of the clashes between them and the limitations imposed by them. These powerful systems of culture inevitably condition, for good or ill, our outlook on life. If there were a way to more accurately understand how and why certain worldviews form, the relationships between them, and the dynamics of their internal structure, that knowledge would be invaluable in positively influencing cultural evolution around the globe.
Like many of his generation, McIntosh had firsthand experience of cultural change. He had grown up in Los Angeles in the wake of the 1960s, when what is often referred to as the postmodern worldview was just flowering in the culture. He hung out on Venice Beach and had “countercultural loyalties,” but he was more interested in turning on and tuning in than in dropping out. Whip smart and motivated, he was interested in how the tremendous excitement and inspiration generated by the countercultural movements of the time would translate into real social progress. As the revolutionary energy of the ’60s faded into the individualism of the ’70s and the Aquarian Age became the New Age, McIntosh pursued the spiritual side of the movement with great vigor, becoming interested in the emerging intersection between science and spirit—“which has been a foundation for my intellectual interests ever since,” he says.
But over the next decades, McIntosh began to see that amid all of the excitement of the countercultural movement, problems were becoming obvious as well. The original promise of a broad-minded, inclusive, cross-cultural, intellectually rich, science-friendly spiritual tradition had been buried under a mountain of esoteric ideas, fly-by-night creeds, and have-it-your-own-way philosophies, leaving many dissatisfied and turning elsewhere for spiritual sustenance. And moreover, the “anything goes” mentality of the movement was making it increasingly fragmented and ineffective as a force for social progress. All of which made McIntosh think more deeply about how culture actually evolves. What is authentic cultural evolution? What makes it sustainable and lasting? What makes it spiritually rich—good, beautiful, and true? What was the difference, for example, between the incredible philosophical flights of classical Greece, which were ultimately unsustainable by the culture of the time, and the inspired rationality of the European Enlightenment, which was able to take lasting root, developing into a rich new worldview that transformed every institution of society, changing human culture permanently, and eventually allowing a southern aristocrat named Thomas Jefferson to rewrite the rules of politics and jump-start a new kind of nation?
There was another influence in McIntosh’s life as well, one that, as we have seen, shows up in just about every Evolutionary’s life at some point—Teilhard de Chardin. Here was a thinker who embraced science with a passion but was rooted in the spiritual and religious dimension of life. And McIntosh was particularly struck by Teilhard’s use of an unusual word—noosphere.
“Noosphere” is a critical term when it comes to understanding the relationship between consciousness and evolution. In fact, “noosphere” and “intersubjectivity,” as we shall see, are quite related. They both point to that underappreciated, and in some cases unrecognized, dimension of evolution—the interior of the collective. “This idea allowed us to see cultural evolution from a spiritual perspective, and also from a scientifically informed perspective,” recalled McIntosh.
“Noosphere” was Teilhard’s word, though he wasn’t the first to use it in publication. That distinction goes to Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, who appropriated the term from the Jesuit. It is an evocative idea and has inspired many cultural leaders today, from Mario Cuomo to Al Gore to Marshall McLuhan. The word is a composite of the “sphere” part of atmosphere, lithosphere, stratosphere, biosphere, and so on, and the term “noetic,” which means the realm of knowledge. Teilhard used the term “noosphere” to describe what he referred to as the “thinking layer” that surrounds the planet like a thin, invisible envelope of collective consciousness, representing the sum total of humanity’s interior life. Just as evolution first formed the biosphere, a planet-enfolding sheath of living organisms, the noosphere, according to Teilhard, represents the next staging ground for evolution’s advance. And as cultural evolution progresses, the noosphere itself grows more dense and complex, more rich and intense, more focused and multilayered, with all the interior qualities—good and bad—of an evolving society. Cultural evolution happens right here, in the collective interior life of humanity. “We have to realize that evolution has leapt beyond the biological context,” McIntosh explains.
For Teilhard, there was always a relationship between the evolution of interior consciousness and the evolution of exterior complexity. “The Physical and the Psychic, the Without and the Within, Matter and Consciousness, are all . . . functionally linked in one tangible process,” he wrote. For example, the human brain, looked at from the outside, is one of the most complex things we know of in the entire universe. Looked at from the inside, it also houses the most advanced form of consciousness we know of in the entire universe. Such observations give weight to the idea that there is an important relationship between the evolution of physical complexity on the outside and the evolution of consciousness within. Teilhard called it the law of complexity and consciousness. And for him, it applied not just to physical organisms but to large collectives as well. According to this law, as the noosphere progresses, we should see a correlation between the complexity of our techno-socio-economic systems and the sophistication of our collective consciousness. And as we have discussed, many point to the evolution of communications and information technology as demonstrating this very trend and marvel at Teilhard’s prescience.
The birth of the noosphere, according to Teilhard, coincided with the birth of Homo sapiens sapiens, the birth of self-reflective thought in higher primates, the birth of the animal who knows that he knows and has an interior life unlike any the world had ever seen. Science today cannot say exactly when this threshold of self-consciousness was crossed, or even if threshold is the right word. Was it a sudden and solitary moment, a dramatic and immediate breakthrough? Or a gradual process? All we know for sure is that 40,000 to 60,000 years ago, something quite dramatic happened in the evolution of the hominid mind. As psychologist Robert Godwin puts it, “existence mysteriously becomes experience.” During that phase of history, early humans passed an evolutionary tipping point. Art, creativity, language, self-identity, and new technologies all burst onto the scene, a creative cultural explosion that was both unprecedented and unexpected.
“Why, all of a sudden, do humans all over the globe begin expressing an urge to create, to bring into being beautiful artifacts that serve no utilitarian purpose?” asks Godwin. For Teilhard, at least, the answer had to do with a very specific kind of breakthrough that was achieved during this time period. As our brains became larger and larger, they retained the capacity for increasing consciousness, interiority, subjectivity, and psychic awareness. And slowly (though rather quickly in evolutionary time), as the first higher primates made their journey out of Africa into uncharted lands and the new mental heights of Homo erectus and Australopithecus and Neanderthal man, consciousness was intensifying. The complexity of interior lives was increasing. Finally, in one particular primate, consciousness reached a culmination. The rising temperature reached the boiling point. We don’t know the exact conditions, or reasons. But we do know that something unprecedented happened. Teilhard evokes this moment in The Human Phenomenon:
[E]verywhere the active phyletic lines grow warm with consciousness towards the summit. But in one well-marked region at the heart of the mammals, where the most powerful brains ever made by nature are to be found, they become red hot. And right at the heart of that glow burns a point of incandescence.
We must not lose sight of that line crimsoned by the dawn. After thousands of years rising below the horizon, a flame bursts forth at a strictly localised point.
Thought is born.
Brian Swimme, in The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, tries to imagine the moment when conscious self-awareness first appeared in what he calls the Earth Community, to picture “a pioneering hominid at the dawn of human history” awakening to the awesome fact of awareness. “Some animal entered into the experience without understanding what was taking place,” he speculates, “for no other animal had ever been in that mode of existence before.” Godwin envisions “a luminous fissure . . . the dawning of an internal horizon in a universe now divided against itself, the unimaginable opening of a window on the world.”
Whether or not these characterizations are correct in their representation of the events of 40,000 years ago is secondary to the fact that we have yet to fully appreciate the implications of the miraculous evolutionary leap that took place in that time period. Teilhard describes it as the birth of another world. “Abstraction, logic, reasoned choice and inventions, mathematics, art, calculations of space and time, anxieties and dreams of love—all these activities of inner life are nothing else than the effervescence of the newly formed center as it explodes on to itself,” he writes. And he goes on to make the critical distinction that human self-reflective consciousness, when compared to the animal consciousness that preceded it, “is not merely a change of degree, but a change of nature, resulting from a change of state.”
Teilhard was not the only early-twentieth-century thinker who began to suspect that there might be a realm within the collective mind of humanity that mysteriously connected one person’s inner psychic space to another’s. In fact, the great Swiss psychologist Carl Jung coined the term “collective unconscious” to explain a similar idea. Jung began to recognize that his patients were coming across images, symbols, and psychological forces in their own inner lives that he suspected were connected to a deeper layer of the human experience, archetypal currents that transcended the personal psyche of any one individual and his or her history.
This realization prompted Jung to suggest that beyond the subjective psyche, there is a collective dimension of the interior life that we are all connected to, and he termed that interior realm the “collective unconscious.” He wrote that there exists a “psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals.” Now, at first glance Jung’s collective unconscious and Teilhard’s noosphere may seem like different terms. After all, they were meant to describe different types of phenomena. One is explicitly evolutionary; one is not. One has psychological overtones; one has scientific overtones. But once you get past the superficial differences, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that these two great theorists were, each in his own way and according to his own language, shouting from the mountaintop about the exact same breakthrough—that there is a collective interior dimension to consciousness. Whether we call it the noosphere, the collective unconscious, or intersubjectivity, it is real. It is an integral part of the evolutionary dynamics of nature, and I suspect it will help revolutionize our understanding of cultural evolution in the coming century.
NOT I, NOT IT, BUT WE
While the term “intersubjective” may be unfamiliar, what it points to is not at all so. In fact, we experience the intersubjective dimension so often that we take it for granted. But think about it for a minute. If consciousness is entirely subjective—contained in the individual brain—then how could we relate to one another so intimately, so profoundly, so deeply? As Ken Wilber puts it, “How on earth do you get in my mind, and I get in your mind, enough that we are in each other to the point that we both agree we can see what the other sees? However this happens, it is a miracle.”
McIntosh, whose writings on the subject have been greatly inspired by Wilber’s philosophy, writes that “Relationships exist in the internal space ‘in between us,’ not wholly in our minds and not wholly in the minds of those with whom we are related, but mutually inside both of our minds and often simultaneously. These relationship structures are partially independent from our individual subjective consciousness, but at the same time internal and invisible.”
When two people share a political conviction, when two lovers share an intimate moment, when two colleagues build a business together, they are each, in some small way, creating, participating in, and sharing a real, intersubjective world space. We could say that those relationships have an independent reality in the internal universe of the noosphere. Spend time with any long-married couple and you can really appreciate this. Whatever the personalities of the individuals in the relationship, the relationship has its own life, its own structure, its own complexities. It is almost an entity unto itself.
“Relationships have an ontological reality that is not just in my head,” McIntosh explained to me in one of our conversations. “If I have a relationship with a six-foot rabbit named Harvey, that’s a completely subjective reality within my brain. But if you and I are becoming friends, there’s an independent reality of our relationship, which takes form and has a systemic existence. And even though the relationship exists in the overlap of our mutual experience, we can also begin to recognize that this relationship itself has a structure. It’s what I would characterize as a system of culture.”
“People think that because they can’t see it, culture doesn’t exist,” says Grant McCracken, an anthropologist who has made his name convincing corporate leaders to take notice of this dimension. Culture, he tells us, is “the meanings and rules with which we understand and act in the world. This makes culture sound amorphous and absurdly abstract, I know. But let’s put this another way. Culture is the very knowledge and scripts we will someday build into robots to make them socially sentient creatures. At the moment, we’re still teaching them to climb stairs.” McCracken’s work points to a truth connected to this dimension that corporate leaders struggle with every day. Corporations, like relationships, have their own subculture, an independent collection of values and attitudes that define a company and influence it greatly. Change a few people, even a few hundred, and the culture doesn’t necessarily change at all. Changing corporate culture is hard, any consultant will tell you, because you’re not just dealing with individuals but the collective momentum of this larger cultural structure. Yes, it was certainly created by the intent of many autonomous individuals but once established, it can seem to act as an organism unto itself—an independent, intersubjective system—one that can exert influence and resist change.
“Of all the dimensions that are easy to miss, intersubjectivity is at or near the top,” writes Wilber in Integral Spirituality. Our modern scientific efforts have for the most part heavily focused on the external, physical, objective universe. Science has struggled to explain, through the limited lens of biology, how these tool-making bipeds have been able to develop such a remarkably sophisticated culture in so little time. Indeed, looking for an explanation for cultural evolution by appealing solely to biology reminds me of that joke about a guy searching for his keys under the streetlamp. “Where did you lose your keys?” a helpful stranger asks. “Over by my car,” the man replies. “Then why are you searching under the streetlamp?” asks the confused stranger. “Because this is where the light is,” the man answers. Similarly, science has tended to stay away from consciousness because of the murky and confusing nature of the subject, preferring the more well-lit domains of biology and physics. But if we want to fully understand the nature of evolution, and especially cultural evolution, consciousness is where the keys are.
Remember, however, that the kind of consciousness we are talking about here transcends the lone individual’s subjective interior. The war between science and spirit is often framed as a war between subjectivity and objectivity, between the private, personal world of the individual and the external world of nature, between the “I” and the “it.” But there is another realm, which is distinct from both of those. And most people do indeed miss it altogether. But they miss it in much the same way people “missed” gravity before Newton. It’s hiding in plain sight.
To help contextualize this new terrain of inquiry, McIntosh likes to use an example from history: the way we understood the human body before and after the Renaissance. He points out that the interior of the body used to be off limits to exploration; it was considered to be almost mystical and there was a great deal of superstition and uncertainty associated with what lies underneath our biological skin. Remember, Michelangelo had to break all kinds of Church rules and cultural taboos in order to perform the dissections necessary to understand the muscular structures that allowed him to so marvelously depict the human form. And through his and others’ efforts, we now know that there is nothing particularly mystical going on inside our bodies at all, just a set of extraordinarily complex systems and structures that we are still exploring and defining today.
The same, arguably, is true of this intersubjective dimension. It may seem almost mystical today, but I suspect that further exploration will reveal an interior universe that is complex and subtle yet readily yields itself to deeper understanding. In fact, it is already beginning to do so. And just as we can look at the external universe and see all of Darwin’s “endless forms most beautiful” that have evolved in our biosphere, the internal universe—the noosphere, the intersubjective dimension—has its own complex systems, structures, and forms of consciousness that are evolving. Just as we have come to appreciate that the physical world is composed of a truly startling degree of complexity, that even the seemingly simplest structure is composed of complex configurations of smaller and smaller networks of particles and energy systems, so too we would do well not to underestimate the complexity of the internal universe. Every thought, every feeling, every reactionary emotion and each complex vision, careful calculation, or intuitive perception is built upon vast networks of interlocking and interdependent thoughts, implicit and explicit conclusions, values, perceptions, agreements, paradoxical perspectives, complicated decision-making processes, amalgams of images and ideas, psychological complexes, archetypal patterns, and multiple layers of awareness. It is truly a vast internal universe, and the recognition of this helps explain why the physical correlates of this dimension—human brains—are the most complex entities, as far as we know, in the entire world.
Can an exploration of this internal universe really be compared to the scientific exploration of the physical body? For some, talk of inner space inevitably borders on the spiritual. And to some extent I understand that. It certainly blurs the lines between science and spirit. There are a couple of reasons, however, why I am always hesitant to automatically associate this interior dimension with the spiritual. First, there are all kinds of thoughts and values that exist in the noosphere that aren’t particularly spiritual at all. But perhaps the other reason is that people tend to associate the word “spiritual” with things that are inherently beyond rationality, beyond clear language, things we can only speak about in stories and metaphors. How many extremely bright, sensible people have I seen resort to the most strange, esoteric, nonsensical language when they begin to speak about the so-called spiritual dimension of life? They throw out their common sense altogether and surrender their levelheadedness—as if spirituality inevitably implied vagueness, silence, or irrationality.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with poetry, myth, and metaphor when it comes to this interior world. That’s a time-honored way of representing it. And mystical insight does certainly involve transrational, nonconceptual states of being. But there is a huge difference between genuinely transrational spiritual states, intuitions, and experiences, and areas of knowledge that may be subtle, complex, and relatively unexplored yet hardly unnatural or unknowable. We should never blindly conflate nonphysical with supernatural. I suspect that over time we will discover that the science of this internal universe, while subtle in terms of our present conceptions, is well within the framework of a sensible, comprehensible universe. And just as the emerging understanding of the body in the Renaissance radically changed our capacity to enhance physical health, so too will a new understanding of the structures and systems that constitute the interior of human culture enhance our capacity to affect the health of our global society.
In fact, it would be wrong to give the impression that this internal universe is entirely unexplored. We investigate aspects of this interior world all the time, in sociology, anthropology, hermeneutics, and so on. Psychologists, of course, have been exploring this area with great intensity over the past century and depth psychologists even more so—Jung being just one example. Mystics and visionaries have pursued the spiritual depths of the interior universe for millennia. More recently, certain analytic philosophers with a focus on linguistics have directly explored the nature of symbolic communication between people as constituting essential elements of our social fabric. And that’s just a small list among the many people who are exploring—directly or indirectly, explicitly or implicitly—this interior space. But most have done so without the kind of philosophical framework I am pointing to here. Like pioneers in a new land, they are each following particular trails and uncovering different characteristics of the terrain, yet none has a map of the whole, a sense of the enormity of the territory and the integrated pattern of its many dimensions. They also tend to be captured by the spell of solidity, lacking a rich sense of how our shared collective interiors are moving and changing, and playing a significant role in the dynamics of cultural evolution.
One dimension of this discussion that does feature prominently in public discourse is the idea of worldviews. But while our public intellectuals use the term in discussions of politics and globalization, they do so primarily from a surface viewpoint—noticing the patterns of external symptoms but lacking a sense of the underlying systemic causes that an in-depth perspective on consciousness and culture helps to provide. Worldviews may be more than just a label we apply to the common characteristics, values, and beliefs in any given group of people that our social scientists have noticed in their surveys. That objective data speaks to deeper intersubjective truths. Perhaps these worldviews have a kind of systemic, independent existence that must be taken into account if we are to understand how culture evolves, and how culture influences individual and collective perspectives on the world. In other words, perhaps they are quite real—not material, but real nonetheless.
So if this interior cultural dimension is real, then what does it mean for it to evolve? Indeed, what is actually evolving when it comes to human culture? McIntosh’s answer is that it is “the quality and quantity of connections between people, taking the form of shared meanings, experiences, and agreements.”
“Agreement” is an important word in understanding this new terrain. Returning to a biological metaphor, agreements are, as McIntosh puts it, “the cells of the noosphere.” In this regard, he draws on the work of Jürgen Habermas, the German philosopher who made linguistic agreements so central to his work. So what is an agreement? For example, agreements as to the meaning of certain sounds and symbols, which we call language, are some of the most foundational to human civilization. Without these agreements, we are unable to communicate, much less form a cohesive culture. More complex agreements would be ideas of what’s right and what’s wrong, for instance, or religious beliefs like the notion that a transcendent God is keeping track of each individual’s actions in some heavenly log book and will weigh up their fates accordingly on Judgment Day. It is only the tacit agreement of individuals that gives such a notion its cultural power. Those outside the Judeo-Christian tradition do not lose sleep over their record in the Book of Life.
We can think of these agreements or “cultural cells” as the building blocks of worldviews. It is the accumulation of agreements into larger and larger constellations that eventually results in massive and complex internal structures or worldviews, composed ultimately of thousands and thousands of tiny agreements, just as an organism is composed of thousands of tiny cells. Some of these agreements will be foundational to the worldview and some more cosmetic; some will have to do with the deep, underlying logic of that worldview, and some the surface behavioral manifestations. But perhaps the hardest part to grasp is that these internal structures, once formed, have a reality that exists independently of any particular individual, a momentum of their own. And it is the recognition of this reality that allows us to treat these complex worldviews as legitimate internal structures of evolutionary unfolding that abide by clear principles and natural laws.
A GAME-CHANGING PERSPECTIVE
The evolution of worldviews is something that’s always much easier to see in retrospect. For example, it’s easier to see, with a bird’s-eye view of history, how the evolution of the Axial Age religions, beginning in the fifth century BC, was likely a natural evolutionary response to the brutality of the Iron Age culture of Persia and the Middle East. The clarity of hindsight reveals how the modern worldview of the Western Enlightenment was a natural evolutionary response to the excesses, corruption, and failings of the traditional Christian worldview of the Middle Ages. And from the distance of decades it’s not difficult to appreciate how the countercultural movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, culminating in the seismic shifts of the 1960s, were a reaction to the many problems created by the excesses of modernity and the industrial revolution. But Evolutionaries are not just interested in the past; they are interested in the future. And charting the next cultural emergence takes much more than a rich sense of history. It takes a deeper knowledge of how evolution operates in the internal universe of values, agreements, and worldviews . . . and a little talent for informed speculation. “If you’ll pardon the comparison, you and I are like beatniks sitting in a café in North Beach in 1952 trying to imagine what the sixties are going to be like,” McIntosh said to me over dinner one evening at a conference in California. “We have an inkling of it, but we don’t have the cultural structures to point to yet.”
The first time McIntosh began to get an inkling of what a new worldview might look like, he told me, was in 1999, just as winter was beginning to descend on the slopes of the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Ken Wilber, who had also made his home on the edge of the Rockies and who had done so much to bring highly sophisticated evolutionary thinking to the spiritual side of the countercultural movement, had just formed Integral Institute, and was hosting gatherings of sympathetic thinkers, authors, scholars, and spiritual leaders in Boulder. Soon McIntosh’s name was on the invitation list, and he entered into a new sphere of relationships informed by new values and agreements. He began to recognize that this nexus of interacting ideas, people, and philosophies represented not just a blip on the cultural radar but a genuinely new movement, supported by an original philosophical framework that, in the words of Wilber, transcended and included many of the problems of the countercultural movement.
Like the coming of the dawn in a darkened landscape, McIntosh’s own vague intuitions of the problems with the countercultural movement were illuminated. He was able to see its great strengths—a respect for spirituality, a tolerance of other cultures and faiths, a capacity to appreciate the perspectives of others, an intense concern for the environment, a newfound respect for indigenous cultures, a deep compassion for the plight of the victims of society, and a passion for minority rights. At the same time, he could see now, more clearly than ever, the many weaknesses of this cultural movement—its “anything goes” individualism, its tendency toward narcissism, its pathological resistance to all hierarchies, its social idealism combined with political impotence, and its dangerous propensity to romanticize premodern cultures, peoples, and faiths. He could see all of these things from the inside out. After all, the counterculture was his culture. He had shared its agreements and lived its values—explored its limits, indulged its opportunities, suffered its disappointments and embodied its dreams. But now he was changing and beginning to appreciate a powerful new truth—that the postmodern, countercultural worldview was just that, a worldview. It wasn’t the be-all and end-all of cultural evolution. “I was just filled with this spirit of excitement,” he explained to me. “I was beginning to see with more clarity than ever that worldviews, these structures of culture, had an evolutionary reality. They had an existence that was independent of any particular person’s writing or thinking.”
As the conversations between McIntosh and me deepened, I felt a similar spirit of excitement. As I began to contemplate the evolutionary reality of these structures in the internal universe, I knew this was one of the most potentially game-changing facets of an evolutionary worldview when it comes to facilitating authentic social and cultural transformation.
Consider the great philosophers of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. They did more than simply change the institutions of society; they helped reinvent the underlying agreements and values that society held to be important. Eventually, those new agreements called for new rules, new laws, new rulers, and entirely new institutions. And today, we are still unraveling the contours of the modern worldview they helped bring to life. They created, we might say, new intersubjective agreements, and eventually an entirely new worldview, a new way of making meaning, and in so doing, changed culture in a deep and lasting way. The problems of their time were not just institutional or material or economic or political; they were also problems of consciousness, and so they sought to raise the consciousness of European culture. They built new institutions that reflected this change in values.
In the same way, if we are to both evolve our own culture and understand the evolution of cultures in general, we will need to more deeply understand how agreements form worldviews. This book is, from a certain point of view, an attempt to shed light on the kinds of agreements that are informing, and creating, an evolutionary worldview. Furthermore, if we are to help other cultures in our globalizing world to move forward, to transcend the entrenched patterns that create political and social dysfunction, we will need to be able to see through the surface institutions and conflicts to the deeper structures that lie beneath, and learn how to enable them to mature. There is cultural leverage in this perspective, a way that we can effect change “from the inside out,” so to speak, which means evolving the underlying agreements, values, and worldviews that influence both our personal consciousness and the collective institutions of our society. “Understanding the anatomy of an agreement,” McIntosh predicts, “will be one of the new sciences of the noosphere.”
While I don’t expect the new sciences of the noosphere to be making their debut in mainstream university curricula anytime soon, and consciousness is still a term that understandably evokes more associations with personal meditation and private contemplation than intersubjective inquiry and shared cultural evolution, there are significant changes in the intellectual climate today that are opening up the interior world to objective analysis as never before. Once esoteric dimensions are being made transparent to our questing eyes, revealing new truths and shedding new light on existing ones. Biological development, we are learning, is just one of the tricks up evolution’s sleeve. Once upon a time, evolution took a step, a leap, and catapulted itself into a whole new category. Evolution itself evolved. It created a new space in which to operate. We might say that human culture, in all its beauty and complexity, is the result. Biology and culture, genes and memes, can neither be perfectly separated nor grossly conflated. They are two distinct and influential parts of evolution’s layered emergence. Consciousness, it turns out, is not a mere sideshow in the evolution revolution. It is an integral part of a comprehensive understanding of Darwin’s favorite idea.