Evolutionary Spirituality: A New Orientation
Once men thought Spirit divine, and Matter diabolic. . . . Now science and philosophy recognize the parallelism, the approximation, the unity of the two: how each reflects the other as face answers to face in a glass, nay, how the laws of both are one. . . .
We are learning not to fear truth.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Sovereignty of Ethics”
In February of 1836, the world’s most famous scientific voyage docked in King George Sound in Southwest Australia on its way to circumnavigating the globe. The ship, named the Beagle, pulled into the harbor, and its young passenger, Charles Darwin, disembarked and spent eight days in this lonely outpost of the British Empire. One day, while he was visiting a local settlement, a large tribe of native Australian aboriginals stopped by to trade with the colonialists. And after exchanging some goods with the English settlers, Darwin reports that these natives held a great dancing party in the evening, a sort of tribal ritual. His accounts make it sound something like a rave at Burning Man, with less Ecstasy and more spears. Our young evolutionist was not impressed, calling it a “most rude, barbarous scene.”
“Everyone appeared in high spirits,” he wrote, “and the group of nearly naked figures, viewed by the light of the blazing fires, all moving in hideous harmony, formed a perfect display of a festival amongst the lowest barbarians.”
Almost two centuries later, Nicholas Wade, the science editor for the New York Times, wrote in The Faith Instinct, his book on evolution and religion, that these “emotionally compelling dramas of music, chant and dusk-to-dawn dances” represented some of the very first forms of religious expression. Darwin’s dancing tribesmen were a modern window into an ancient rite, a glimpse of how our distant ancestors paid tribute to a sense of the divine.
Personally, I find this evolutionary tidbit fascinating and more than a little ironic, because one of the earliest memories I have of the influence of religion on my own life is watching my sister struggle to understand why her date to the biggest dance of the year, where she was to be crowned queen of the school, would not be allowed to dance with her because of his parents’ religious beliefs. Her anger and tears etched in my ten-year-old mind the painful consequences of religious conservatism. I guess the hardline Baptists in my hometown hadn’t heard the news about Darwin’s natives and the roots of religious faith.
In the vast historical epochs between the let’s-dance-all-night tribal mind of ancient humans and the Jesus-hates-dancing conclusions of some contemporary Christians, we find quite the range of religious expression. It’s so great in fact, that to even begin to treat it all as one phenomenon would seem an exercise in futility. Nevertheless, that hasn’t stopped a growing wave of Darwinian scholars like Wade from trying their hand at explaining the evolutionary logic of why some people bend their knee to exalt a supreme being and others boogie all night by the campfire to celebrate a higher power.
When I marry the words “evolution” and “spirituality,” this is what comes to mind for many—the effort to explain the evolutionary origins of religion and the spiritual impulse. There are in fact, as we shall see, other profound and interesting ways to combine these two terms, but perhaps the most common way is to start asking questions like: Why did religious faith evolve? What accounts for the emergence of the “faith instinct” or the “God gene,” to use the current terminology? According to some scholars, religion must have evolved because it provided some kind of adaptive advantage to our ancestors. As Kenneth V. Kardong, author of the recent Beyond God bluntly puts it: “Religion is not inserted by the hand of God, nor is it an outgrowth of the human psyche attempting to deal with the realities of existence. . . . Like large brains and upright posture, religion arose for the survival benefits it bestowed.” Perhaps in the extraordinary group cohesion that the religious impulse fosters among believers, the thinking goes, we can find the key to its adaptive advantage. Religious solidarity, which generally is considered to be one of the strongest social glues that we know of, even today, could be the hidden motive behind the persistence of faith in human history. After all, few agreements form the kind of tight bond that religious agreements do. And those bonds may have been crucial to enduring the trials and tribulations of life over the course of the history of our species. Religious faith endures today, we are told, not because it represents any kind of accurate or well-conceived appraisal of how the universe works but because it was those groups with religious faith that survived and thrived and therefore passed on the particular instinct to their descendants—us.
It’s a good hypothesis, and I suspect there may be seeds of real truth in it. Unfortunately, such accounts tend to be used not simply to help us understand the multidimensional reality of the human spiritual and religious impulse but to oversimplify it and explain it away, to dismiss it entirely as a sort of industrious and happy delusion that tricks us into fulfilling a positive social purpose. Granted, that’s probably a significant upgrade from Marx’s view of religion as the “opiate of the masses,” but we should be extremely careful about such sweeping conclusions. They tend to be more ideological than empirical. Luckily, we can always embrace the fascinating insights of new knowledge and research without adopting the attendant reductionism. In other words, we can appreciate the legitimate and fascinating science that helps fill out the picture of how something like religion evolved without necessarily accepting the oft-added overlay of philosophical and metaphysical conclusions that better reflect the attitude of the author than the logical conclusion of the research.
There is another problem with such thinking. It tends to paint religious and spiritual pursuits with one generalized brush, not fully accounting for the incredible diversity of what we call religious practice and the way it has changed and developed through history. We might say that this is partially the result of an impoverished understanding of the development of consciousness and culture. In such accounts, there is very little sense of the evolutionary view of the emergence of human consciousness that we’ve been exploring in the previous chapters of this book. And without that perspective, the Flintstones fallacy runs rampant. The moment we accept the possibility that the human mind has changed quite radically over the course of history, then we need to rethink our relationship to religion. And then we can begin to see the obvious truth that religious and spiritual pursuits have also changed dramatically over the course of the last ten thousand years—arguably in tandem with the development of human consciousness.
Indeed, it is critical that we break the spell of solidity in the way we think about religion. As worldviews change and evolve, so too does religion. This is another way in which the terms “spirituality” and “evolution” are being combined. There are not only various cultural expressions of religion in different parts of the globe; there are types of religious expression that correspond to certain levels of individual and cultural development. As Wilber, Beck, and others have pointed out, the way we interpret any spiritual or religious experience is going to change over time, depending on the worldviews that condition all of our experience. A person whose developmental center of gravity is at the mythic or traditional level is going to have a very different type of Christianity from a modernist, and that in turn will be quite distinct from a postmodern orientation. Think about the difference between the warlike, tribal Christianity of the Crusades; the mythic rituals of traditional Catholicism; the achievement-oriented modern message of megachurch pastors like Joel Osteen; and the peace-loving, interfaith-oriented approach of Unitarian churches. Not only are these obviously very different interpretations of the faith, they are also developmental stages in its expression that correspond to the cultural stages described by Gebser, Graves, and others.
We can find a similar notion explored in Emory University professor James W. Fowler’s work on the “stages of faith.” A colleague of Lawrence Kohlberg at Harvard, Fowler developed a theory of stages of religious development, which he outlined in his 1981 book, Stages of Faith.
Fowler’s work examines religion, in the broadest sense of that complex term, as the way in which we think about and relate to the ultimate nature of existence. Under that definition, even many forms of modern atheism and naturalism are really better classified as modernist forms of religious expression (Stage Four in Fowler’s construction). After all, they often represent strong conclusions about the ultimate nature of being upon which whole systems of cultural rules, norms, and ethics are constructed. And it’s important to note that in Fowler’s sequence, as in all the more sophisticated developmental systems, higher is not always better. There can be healthy and unhealthy expression of each stage of evolution’s unfolding.
Once we truly begin to appreciate the evolutionary nature of even a universal phenomenon like religion, we can begin to see how regrettable it is that so many scholars, especially scientists, tend to think about it as a single phenomenon, as if most of human history can be broken down into a simple two-step affair. First there was religion, then science. First faith, then reason. First belief and superstition, then logic and rationality. First supernaturalism, then naturalism. In such formulations, all forms of religious expression get lumped into one broad category. That is a misleading way to think about religion, because important distinctions, such as those discussed above, will be overlooked and smudged together, leading to inaccurate conclusions about the whole subject.
Current debates about God often find themselves embroiled in these distortions. The New Atheists, despite their laudable championing of modernity’s gifts of science, reason, and rationality, tend to propagate this unfortunate confusion. While some may be quite clear about how they define religion, associating it narrowly and exclusively with a faith in a supernatural, mythic God (or gods)—a faith that is still the foundation of many of the belief systems active in the world today—many are less careful. They tend to see all mystically or spiritually inclined individuals as being afflicted with more benign strains of the same underlying disease. What they often fail to acknowledge is that not all religious expression is created equal. Even under the umbrella of any particular tradition, there are vastly different ways of thinking about God, each of which represents certain worldviews, perspectives, and stages of faith. And for those of us who enthusiastically embrace both the deepest intimations of the spiritual impulse and the tremendous virtues that flow from the project of science, the first order of business is to free the idea of spirit from being frozen in history and exclusively associated with the traditional, mythic, transcendent, otherworldly, anthropomorphic, dogmatic, old-man-in-the-sky-God belief system, by whatever name.
The terms “evolution” and “spirituality” meet in this endeavor to understand the evolution of the religious impulse, as well as in the search for the god gene or faith instinct. But there is yet a third confluence of these ideas, a form of specifically evolutionary spirituality that is emerging in our time. Rather than simply looking through an evolutionary lens at already established forms of spirituality or religion, some Evolutionaries are intuiting and forging a new spirituality, a new theology, a new mysticism, a new cosmology, and a new morality that is an expression of the evolutionary worldview I’ve been sharing in these pages. Not simply accepting of the idea of evolution, it is informed by the insights and perspectives revealed by our relatively new knowledge of our cosmic, biological, and cultural origins. This new spirituality is distinct from both traditional religious theism and the anything-goes “spiritual but not religious” pluralism more common in progressive culture.
Evolutionary spirituality is evolution-inspired, world-embracing, and future-oriented. It is a creative, anticipatory spiritual path in which salvation, however we define that word, is to be found not in connection to the ancestral spirits of yesteryear, in promises of a heavenly beyond, in achieving a transcendent state of inner peace, or even in letting go into a timeless present, but in fully embracing the emergent potential contained in the depths of an evolving cosmos.
FOR THOSE WHO LOVE THIS WORLD
He was a child of Italian immigrants, raised Catholic in a poor neighborhood in Queens, New York, in the 1930s. His mother and father never learned to read, but it would be a book that changed his life. A smart kid, he earned a scholarship to a good Catholic prep school, but religious questions began to trouble him. By the time he got to law school, his confusion had grown. Unable to reconcile himself to the basic tenets of the faith, he was searching for answers.
Then in 1958, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli was named Pope John XXIII, and something important changed in the Catholic faith. A Jesuit author, once banned, had died a few years earlier, and his books—long the subject of rumors, whispers, and shocked speculation—were released from theological censorship and made available to the laity. The young man wasted no time. He sought out the works of this dangerous thinker and began to read. It didn’t take long for the effect to be felt. When he opened the covers of a book titled The Divine Milieu, the first six words—the book’s dedication—hit him like a lightning bolt: “For those who love this world.”
The young man was Mario Cuomo, and he would go on to become governor of New York. The source of his inspiration, of course, was that patron saint of Evolutionaries: Teilhard de Chardin. When Cuomo recounted this story to me some years ago, I found it remarkable—not only because of the deep influence of Teilhard’s evolutionary thinking on an individual who once seemed close to the American presidency but also because his experience is an archetype for the shift in religious revelation that an evolutionary worldview makes possible.
Cuomo, like millions around the world, was raised in the kind of religious context that holds that the primary goal of the religious life is to be found beyond this world—whether it be in the joys of a heavenly afterlife, the bliss of nirvana, the perfection of the Buddhists’ “Pure land,” or the transcendent peace that “passeth all understanding.” In such traditions, this world—its joys and sorrows, pleasures and vices—is considered to be a dangerous place that will test your soul and tempt you away from the true paradise awaiting the pure and righteous.
“The rule of the Catholic Church was: If you enjoy it, it’s a sin. If you enjoy it a lot, it’s a mortal sin,” Cuomo explained to me. “The world is a series of moral obstacles. And the mission is to avoid temptation, avoid ambition, avoid functioning too much in this world—don’t get used to it, because the real joy comes later on in eternity. That was religion.”
The more traditional the context, the more starkly we can see this basic message. In some strains of religious thought, modernity has done much to moderate this impulse, but make no mistake: the antiworld bias that was part and parcel of religion for thousands of years is still alive and well. It is easy to see it, of course, in the afterlife promises of the Christian tradition or the Islamic faith, where all kinds of strange enticements—from bliss, happiness, and moral righteousness to sex with virgins—have been used to keep believers’ attention less on the day-to-day and more on the hereafter. The Eastern traditions of Buddhism and Hinduism, with their visions of multiple lifetimes and reincarnation, have not altered the basic theme—the goal is moksha (spiritual freedom) or enlightenment or nirvana, forms of liberation that free the soul from the shackles of time and the bondage of birth and death. Even the Buddhist ideal of the bodhisattva, so popular in “spiritual but not religious” circles, is merely a different chord in the same basic song. The bodhisattva represents a spiritually liberated individual who vows to delay his or her own liberation until all sentient beings are free from the shackles of time and rebirth. Selfless, for sure, but still in service to an otherworldly ideal.
To be sure, there are many ancient and contemporary spiritual and religious teachings that present themselves differently—non-dual mystical paths that claim no fundamental difference between form and emptiness, between spirit and matter, between heaven and earth. But dig a little beneath the surface and more often than not, the subtle antiworld bias will reveal itself. There are exceptions, such as the world-embracing traditions of the Jewish faith, where the glory of God is revealed in our attempts to perfect and heal the world; in lineages like Kashmir Shaivism, whose tenets specifically distinguished themselves from the world-denying tendencies of Hindu thought; or in the via positiva traditions that have emerged from time to time in the development of Western thought. But the deep marriage of spirit and an otherworldly form of transcendence is still unquestioned by most.
Any definition of a new evolutionary spirituality starts with the breaking of this bias. Evolutionary spirituality, though it comes in many colors, has a message much more suited for the life conditions of the modern and postmodern world: The evolution of this world is the goal of spiritual life. And by “world” I mean the manifest cosmos of time and space, both the interior and exterior realms—consciousness, culture, and cosmos. The action is here—in this time, in this place, in the possibilities that lie in the near and distant future of this culture, this world, this universe. Yes, there still may be spiritual transcendence of the most radical, sublime, and subtle forms, but transcendence is in the service of evolution, not the other way around. And that difference is everything.
Transcendent states of peace and freedom, subtle spiritual realizations, liberating insights, and mystical awakenings are not in and of themselves the goal of evolutionary spirituality. They may be authentic, profound, and life changing. But ultimately, the freedom, insight, and liberation they confer is in service to a larger context, a greater project, a higher goal—the evolution of self, culture, and perhaps, if we may be so bold, of the cosmos itself. That is not to diminish the beauty and majesty of transcendence in all its myriad forms but to expand the circumference of its transformative effects far beyond the confines of any individual self. Evolutionary spirituality calls on us to participate in the deeper processes at work in the development of culture and cosmos, and the experience of transcendence, in this context, must ultimately point us forward—not upward, downward, or inward.
Perhaps the two individuals who brought this distinction most powerfully to light were Teilhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo. One in the West; one in the East. Both lived in the first part of the twentieth century, during what we might call the first wave of evolutionary spirituality. Both were presenting a new vision of their own faith—Teilhard an evolutionary Catholicism and Aurobindo an evolutionary yoga in the Hindu tradition. In order to make their case, each attacked the antiworld bias of his own tradition. And they did so with ferocity.
Teilhard’s thought has surfaced again and again in these pages, a testimony to the breadth of his influence on all facets of an evolutionary worldview. But as we move into the territory of evolutionary spirituality, his own life story becomes relevant as an example of the birth of a new religious sensibility. Teilhard’s world-embracing sensibilities were nurtured among the verdant, wooded hills of Auvergne, France. Born in 1881, he spent his formative years just a few miles from the distinctive marker of that region, the massive Puy de Dôme volcano. And though the fire of this long-dormant natural wonder had grown cool over the preceding ten thousand years, the energy of the land began to nurture in Teilhard’s young heart and mind a different kind of crimson glow—what he later called the “divine radiating from the depths of blazing matter.” It was this unusual passion for the creative energies and potentials contained in matter that characterized Teilhard’s temperament from the start. He loved nature, but not with the aesthetic sensibility of a Romantic. He intuited a deeper dimension to the natural world, sensing that contained in matter was a powerful latent potential that was somehow in process—moving, developing, and building to some future culmination.
The profoundly optimistic and future-oriented thought of this Evolutionary was forged in an unlikely crucible: the battlefields of World War I. A volunteer stretcher bearer who repeatedly chose to stay on the front lines rather than accept a safer job as reward for his valor, he used his four years on the brink of death to contemplate the deeper currents of life. Gazing out one night at the battlefields of Verdun, lit up by flares but now quiet, he wrote: “As I looked at this scene of bitter toil, I felt completely overcome by the thought that I had the honour of standing at one of the two or three spots on which, at this very moment, the whole life of the universe surges and ebbs—places of pain but it is there that a great future (this I believe more and more) is taking shape.” Later, he would reflect on the experience of the front lines: “You seem to feel that you’re at the final boundary between what has already been achieved and what is striving to emerge. . . . The mind . . . gets something like an over-all view of the whole forward march of the human mass, and feels not quite so lost in it. It’s at such moments, above all, that one lives what I might call ‘cosmically.’ ”
Returning from war, Teilhard was a decorated hero, but for him, the real medals of war were the sheaf of essays, letters, and other writings that contained his newly crystallized ideas. The Church authorities, however, were not amused, and he was forbidden to publish. An early essay/poem titled “Hymn to Matter” makes it obvious why. It expresses exactly how this passionate young Jesuit felt about the world of nature and, by extension, the doctrines of the Church:
Blessed be you, harsh matter, barren soil, stubborn rock. . . . Blessed be you, perilous matter, violent sea, untameable passion. . . . Blessed be you, mighty matter, irresistible march of evolution, reality ever newborn; you who, by constantly shattering our mental categories, force us to go ever further and further in our pursuit of the truth. . . .
I bless you, matter, and you I acclaim: not as the pontiffs of science or the moralizing preachers depict you, debased, disfigured—a mass of brute forces and base appetites—but as you reveal yourself to me today, in your totality and your true nature. . . . I acclaim you as the divine milieu, charged with creative power, as the ocean stirred by the Spirit, as the clay molded and infused with life by the incarnate Word.
Teilhard’s tumultuous life took him halfway around the world to China, at the behest of the Church, where he would pen his most famous manuscript, The Phenomenon of Man, as well as a host of essays and meditations while living as a kind of exile. Besides his philosophical musings on evolution, he would make his mark on science as well, participating in some of the most significant paleontological discoveries of the day. Frowned on by the Vatican and rarely welcome in his home country, where his thoughts and lectures tended to stir up too much excitement for the Jesuit hierarchy, he was initially known more for his scientific work than his spiritual thought, and this remained true up until the time of his death in 1955 in New York City. In fact, a very ambivalent relationship with evolution—much less with “evolutionary spirituality”—prevailed in corridors of Rome until the mid-twentieth century. Henri Bergson’s popular Creative Evolution was outlawed by the Vatican and placed on their list of banned books, a heretical distinction that even Darwin’s On the Origin of Species never managed to achieve.
On the other side of the world from Teilhard’s homeland, India’s great evolutionary sage Sri Aurobindo (whose equally colorful life we will explore more fully in chapter 16), made a similarly trenchant critique of the antiworld bias present in much of the Buddhist and Hindu traditions. He was certainly not the first to do so. Western commentators had for years made various claims that Buddhist philosophy equates to some form of nihilism or that Eastern mysticism rejects the material world. But they had done so with their own Western religious biases and from an outsider’s vantage point, often with little true knowledge or experience of the powerful mystical insights, spiritual realizations, and enlightened states of consciousness that the Eastern traditions offer. Aurobindo was different. While schooled in both East and West, he was a native Bengali, and his own spiritual awakening came in the context of a yogic practice. A defender of the tradition, he knew it both philosophically and experientially.
In his spiritual masterpiece, The Life Divine, written in the early twentieth century, Aurobindo presents two “negations” that haunt the contemporary mind. The first is the “materialist denial,” essentially the belief that matter is the be-all and end-all of reality. Aurobindo rejects this position and argues for a “more complete and catholic affirmation” of reality in which the material and immaterial realms are both included. Overall, however, he maintains a positive attitude toward the secular turn in global culture and praises the “indispensable utility of the very brief period of rationalistic materialism through which humanity has been passing.” He acknowledges that spiritual and religious aspirations often lend themselves to interpretations of reality that strain contemporary credulity, and that the embrace of a skeptical, modern attitude could ultimately serve to facilitate a deeper, more “austere” and authentic relationship with spiritual matters than had previously been possible.
For that vast field of [spiritual and religious] evidence and experience which now begins to reopen its gates to us, can only be safely entered when the intellect has been severely trained to a clear austerity; seized on by unripe minds, it lends itself to the most perilous distortions and misleading imaginations and actually in the past encrusted a real nucleus of truth with such an accretion of perverting superstitions and irrationalising dogmas that all advance in true knowledge was rendered impossible. It became necessary for a time to make a clean sweep at once of the truth and its disguise in order that the road might be clear for a new departure and a surer advance. The rationalistic tendency of Materialism has done mankind this great service.
The second of the two negations is what Aurobindo calls the “refusal of the ascetic.” And the sage saves his sharpest barbs for this topic. By “the refusal of the ascetic” he is referring to the opposite tendency to that of materialism: the refusal to accept that the material world is real. In a groundbreaking and courageous chapter, he attacks the antiworld bias of his own tradition with all the intensity of a man who has seen the mountaintop and knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that it is only a stepping-stone to the next summit.
He begins with a full acknowledgment of the profound experiential basis for this tendency toward an antimanifestation, world-is-an-illusion transcendence that infuses so many traditional religious attitudes. He does not reject the ascetic spirit. On the contrary, he notes its “indispensability” and its ongoing contributions to human advancement. But he explains that there is a type of experience that can easily lead us to the conclusion that the world is an illusion or somehow is not real, and we have to be very careful about how we interpret this kind of mystical realization.
For at the gates of the Transcendent stands that mere and perfect Spirit described in the Upanishads, luminous, pure, sustaining the world but inactive in it, without sinews of energy, without flaw of duality, without scar of division, unique, identical, free from all appearance of relation and of multiplicity—the pure Self of the Adwaitins, the inactive Brahman, the transcendent Silence. And the mind when it passes suddenly, without intermediate transitions, receives a sense of the unreality of the world and the sole reality of the Silence which is one of the most powerful and convincing experiences of which the human mind is capable.
Under the powerful influence of this type of experience, Aurobindo explains, it is easy to draw inaccurate conclusions about the nature of the spiritual life and the right relationship to the manifest world. He suggests that the dangers here are “parallel” to the materialist denial of spirit but “more complete, more final, more perilous in its effects on the individuals or collectivities that hear its potent call to the wilderness.” In other words, we can get lost in matter and materialism, but we can also get lost in spirit and a kind of idealism in which only that is real—consciousness, spirit, Brahman, and so on. For Aurobindo, this second negation is the more dangerous and powerful delusion.
Of course, as we sit here and reflect on these issues amid the material comforts of the twenty-first century, almost a century after Aurobindo wrote those words, it may seem strange to imagine that embracing an antiworld spiritual bias could be the more enticing of his two “refusals.” After all, just take a look at the recent spiritual book and movie phenomenon The Secret, where the salvation on offer was not heavenly bliss but a decidedly material fulfillment. There is little doubt that whatever the dominant tendency of early twentieth-century India, here in the twenty-first-century West, materialism is the dominant “refusal” of the day. Even most religious pursuits in the new millennium don’t exactly cry out with a passion for asceticism. And yet we should not dismiss the great sage’s warnings as outdated and culturally irrelevant.
The “refusal of the ascetic” is not simply a stance of outward renunciation. Aurobindo is also talking about an inner position, and here the story gets a little more interesting. Even on the progressive edges of culture today, where ancient religious dogmas hold little sway, the tendency toward a kind of transcendence that countenances an ambivalent relationship with the manifest world is alive and well, albeit in somewhat subtler forms. Look, for example, at the most popular Western mystic of our day, Eckhart Tolle. Tolle’s book The Power of Now inspired millions, including the great oracle of modern media, Oprah Winfrey. A powerfully awakened mystic, Tolle writes in The Power of Now that “the ultimate purpose of the world lies not within the world but in transcendence of the world.” He once declared in an interview with EnlightenNext that the manifest world is simply “ripples on the surface of being” and explained that “every phenomenon in the manifested is so short-lived and so fleeting that, yes, one could almost say that from the perspective of the unmanifested, which is the timeless beingness or presence, all that happens in the manifested realm really seems like a play of shadows.” Tolle’s image echoes a long religious and mystical tradition. “Most theology takes God to be the only real thing there is, all else being only shadows on Plato’s cave,” writes religious scholar Huston Smith.
WHY MATTER MATTERS
When I was twenty-two, I spent a month in Katmandu, Nepal. I was there to visit the beautiful Himalayan nation and to participate with some friends in a month-long retreat. I have many fond memories of that trip to the legendary “roof of the world”—beautiful picnics high in the terraced foothills, morning glimpses of the towering peaks before smog and clouds closed in, quiet evening meditations on the balcony, and visits to the local Buddhist temples. But it was also the scene of my first face-to-face encounter with this subtler yet powerful version of an antiworld bias. It came in the form of a Tibetan Buddhist monk.
The monk in question was a student of a revered Tibetan teacher, a man whom many considered to be one of the highest living expressions of the Buddhist teachings at this time in history. He graciously visited us one afternoon, and we ended up having a long discussion on the roof of our hotel. In many respects, we saw eye to eye on spiritual matters. He too was a serious practitioner and we traded stories and perspectives as to the role of practice on the path to enlightenment. It was hard not to be impressed with the sincerity and dignity of this impressive Tibetan. But when it came to the role of thoughts and emotions in living a spiritual life, something changed. Suddenly, we weren’t so together after all. Every time I referred to a positive emotion—a sense of love, joy, conviction, enthusiasm, good motivation, spiritually inspired excitement, and so on, he would dismiss it immediately. “All display!” he would say with a wave of his hand. In other words, all of these emotions, no matter what their actual content, were nothing but illusions in our minds, empty expressions of the eternal polarity of fear and desire, paths to inevitable attachment and suffering. The best response was to stand back from all of one’s experience like a passive, watchful Buddha, unperturbed by the flux of emotions as they dance across the perceptual screen of the mind.
There is, of course, a spiritual potency to this type of orientation, especially when it is backed up by genuine experience. Indeed, anyone who has ever tasted the deep peace of meditation, come to rest in the stillness beyond the mind’s endless chatter, glimpsed freedom from desire and release from the illusion of material needs, knows for themselves the power of this “pathless path.” And they can understand at least in some measure why Aurobindo called it “one of the most powerful and convincing experiences of which the human mind is capable.” As he suggests, many are so convinced of the reality of the transcendent experience that they conclude that the things of this world are more or less an illusion—the play of samsara, the false world in which unawakened beings suffer and are reborn until they attain enlightenment or nirvana and find eternal release.
Traditionally, such conclusions inspired acts of asceticism, a literal rejection of society and its material trappings. Today, however, there is no great likelihood that the average spiritual seeker will find him or herself compelled to give away all money and possessions, abandon home and family and social responsibilities, and set out barefoot for whatever remaining wilderness can be found. Like the conclusions that lead to it, the dangers today of an antiworld bias are far subtler. But the consequences remain perilous. Especially in an irony-laden, angst-ridden age, we need not be wandering ascetics to become charmed by the seeming spiritual legitimacy of a perspective that allows us to observe rather than act, witness rather than engage, and remain deeply ambivalent about life rather than take the risk to wholeheartedly commit. Such an approach to spirit can easily lead us to the conclusion that what happens in this world is not of great importance. This insidious inference sneaks in around the edges of our minds, undermining not only our sense of conviction in the consequential reality of our actions but also our appreciation of the possibilities that the world presents to us. In a cynical, disbelieving culture, where self-doubt is endemic and so many are hesitant to deeply invest themselves in life and in the possibilities of the future, such conclusions only fan the flames of the wrong kind of detachment. And in the name of peace and spiritual freedom, they can serve to disconnect us from the life-affirming potentials that, as we will see, are the essence of evolutionary spirituality.
Indeed, there is nothing we need more right now in our culture than the kind of conviction that comes from knowing at a deep level that what we do is real and genuinely matters, that it has ethical import. And I don’t just mean ethical in the sense of some ultimate cosmic moral tabulation but in the sense that our actions are connected, in some small but significant way, to the fate of a process much larger than ourselves. Evolutionary spirituality can awaken us to that connection. It can link us to a universal process that is not neutral or inconsequential but more real and important than anything that happens in the up-and-down vagaries of our individual lives. It can lift us beyond the endless cycles of our psychological concerns and connect our own capacity for choice to a 13.7 billion–year process, one that is playing out in the evolution of human consciousness and culture in our time. It can reinvigorate our faith, as I pointed out in chapter 3, in the possibilities of our individual and collective future. And it can make us true believers again—not in heavenly deities or godly favors but in the positive, deeply spiritual nature of life and human potential.
Indeed, one of the many functions of spirituality and religion throughout the ages has been to connect human beings to a sense of something beyond ourselves, a greater context, a higher order. In The Real American Dream, Andrew Delbanco, director of the American Studies program at Columbia University, argues that this urge to transcend the confines of the self is a fundamental part of human nature, which has, over time, shifted its focus but not lessened in intensity. In fact, he writes, “the most striking feature of our contemporary culture is the unslaked craving for transcendence. . . . I see no reason to doubt—and I do not think history supports such doubt—that human beings of all classes and all cultures have this need for contact with what William James called the ‘Ideal Power’ through which that ‘feeling of being in a wider life than that of this world’s little interests’ may be reached. . . . The question we face today is how, or whether, this ‘feeling of being in a wider life’ is still available.”
I would suggest that today the “feeling of being in a wider life”—whether we call it God or transcendence or even enlightenment—is most certainly available. In fact, it is much more so, because we no longer need to look to an otherworldly ideals to find awe, wonder, humility, and moral courage that this greater context provides. James’s “wider life” has become tangible in the extraordinarily vast spatial context that we have now discovered to be our universe, and the unfathomably deep temporal context within which we have found ourselves situated. The limits of our “little interests” are shattered in awakening to the reality that we are much more than merely an infinitesimal speck in that infinite, impersonal expanding cosmic sea. Rather, our cosmic home is not just a place but a process; it is moving, and we are at the very forefront of that temporal unfolding, awakening for the first time to both the physical and spiritual dimensions of that truth—digesting the implications, coming to terms with its existential significance.
Almost a century has passed since the evolutionary spiritual visions of Teilhard and Aurobindo emerged, along with those of their many great contemporaries, such as Bergson and Whitehead. Yet while science, culture, philosophy, and spirituality have certainly evolved since their day, the underlying perspectives these great pioneers offered still feel surprisingly fresh. Perhaps these Evolutionaries of the past were treading a path that their own time and culture was not ready for. While their footprints were striking and profound enough to have remained visible to this day, few were ready to follow and lay down a path, a “Kosmic groove” into the future. But today, this seems to be changing. The evolutionary visions they intuited seem to be finding a greater resonance at the beginning of our new century than they found in their own time. As more and more Evolutionaries awaken to this world-embracing, future-oriented spiritual sensibility, the contours of the path are becoming discernible. And while broad enough to encompass many variations, the direction of the path is clear, and its spiritual, moral, and philosophical imprint on contemporary culture is deepening. In this section we will explore some of these extraordinary emerging visions of evolutionary spirituality.