A forum for seekers of spiritual awakening through self-transcendence, irrespective of spiritual tradition, religious or non-religious background or affiliation.
.... Our goal is to walk with true spiritual seekers, and to provide encouragement along the path as these modern spiritual pilgrims quest for the holy modern grail --- a new state of consciousness and being ....
The attached two-part lecture by Dr. Bruce Lipton will fundamentally change your understanding of the human body, the process of evolution, and perhaps your life. It is that powerful.
Dr. Lipton, a prize-winning cellular biologist, is a pioneer in the field of epigenetics - the study of heritable changes in gene expression or cellular phenotype caused by mechanisms other than changes in the underlying DNA sequence.
That we are not simply the product of our genes, but rather the product of our perceptions of the world is a crucial point that Dr. Lipton demonstrates by taking us through the entire cellular and biological mechanisms understood by "the New Biology" - a field informed by quantum rather than classical mechanics. The all-pervading consciousness that exists within our enviroment, it turns out - in biology as in physics - plays the central role in shaping our world, including our bodies.
Clocking in at roughly three hours, the attached video lecture is nonetheless a truly must-watch documentary, as Dr. Lipton clearly and lucidly explains how changes in the scientific paradigms of biology itself are impacting everything from neo-natal care and disease prevention, to the role of Big Pharma, to the role that spirituality has in optimizing the health and well-being of the individual.
In his best-selling environmental study, "Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed," author Jared Diamond speculates about what went through the mind of the person who chopped down the last tree on Easter Island. One wonders what will go through the mind of the person who ploughs under the last hectare of tropical rainforest on Borneo, harvests the last fish off of Greenland, or burns the last gallon of gasoline in Los Angeles.
In the must-see documentary, "Home," (trailer attached, below) we are given a deep history lesson of life on Earth, our evolution, and the role that we are each now playing in changing the face of the Earth, perhaps irrevocably, And time is running out, we are warned, for us to ameliorate the collective damage we are doing.
An evocative film with spectacular aerial footage, and as poignant in its message as "An Inconvenient Truth," it directly addresses the horrendous impact mankind as a species is having on our shared environment and on each other, citing the following statistics:
20% of the world's population consumes 80% of its resources.
The world spends 12 times more on military expenditures than on aid to developing countries.
5,000 people a day die because of dirty drinking water.
1 billion people have no access to safe drinking water.
Nearly 1 billion people are going hungry.
Over 50% of grain traded around the world is used for animal feed or biofuels.
40% of arable land has suffered long-term damage.
Every year, 13 million hectares of forest disappears.
One mammal in 4, one bird in 8, and one amphibian in 3 are threatened with extinction.
Species are dying out at a rhythm 1,00 times faster than the natural rate.
Three quarters of fishing grounds are exhausted, depleted or in dangerous decline.
The average temperature of the last 15 years have been the highest ever recorded.
The ice cap is 40% thinner than 40 years ago.
There may be at least 200 million climate refugees by 2050.
"The costs of our actions are high," we are shown. "Others pay the price without having been actively involved."
"Must we always build walls to break the chain of human solidarity, to separate peoples and protect the happiness of some from the misery of others?"
And yet the message of "Home" is not pessimistic, but hopeful. "It is too late to be a pessimist," we are warned. . . . "(A) single human can knock down every wall. It is too late to be a pessimist. Worldwide, four children out of five attend school. Never has learning been given to so many human beings. Everyone from richest to poorest can make a contribution."
"It is time to come together," we are told. "What is important is not what is gone, but what remains. We still have half the worlds forests, thousands of rivers and lakes, and glaciers, and thousands of thriving species. We know that the solutions are there today. We all have the power to change."
"(I)t seems clear now that a higher level of consciousness will not emerge unless we plan our living so as to permit that emergence. It is not difficult to understand why this should be so. The higher consciousness transcends the ego; the ego is a transitional stage, a husk. The present level of consciousness, of interest and attention, is almost wholly directed to preserve the ego. "We only live once" is a common motto and to make a life which may be worth while and have satisfied the self when it is over (almost a contradiction in terms) is the aim of "every sensible man." Dealing as we are, and cannot escape dealing, with a creature of body, mind and spirit, we must modify in every favourable way spirit, mind, and body if the new type of consciousness, tentative and vague as it must be in the first stirrings, is to become fully formed."
"It would seem, then, that the forwarding of the evolution of consciousness, the aiding of that further emergence of the psyche, requires, immediately, the constant practice of a certain method of mental focusing and this constant practice, in its turn requires, if it is to be successful and without thwarting strain, to be set in a complete way of life, a way which is centered on the exercise of this focusing, a way in which every activity is subordinate and ancillary to the focusing."
-- Gerald Heard -- ("Pain, Sex and Time," pp. 177-178)
First published in 1939 (and republished in 2004), Heard's "Pain, Sex and Time" is an encyclopedic review of the history of the evolution of transcendental consciousness beyond the ego. Tracing the history of esoteric teachings, mystery schools and mysticism from ancient to modern times, it lays a firm foundation for the premise - attested to in all the world's great religious and wisdom traditions - that a higher state of evolution that is psychical rather than physiological is our destiny. However, as Heard points out, above, for this next evolutionary step in our development, a conscious and strenuous effort is needed, a conclusion that is at once more pertinent, imperative and challenging in our hyper-connected, hyperactive world today then it was when first written.
"When such extensive requirements and radical modifications of customary living are said to be necessary," Heard accedes, "many may withdraw, using as an excuse that such a change of life for the sake of attaining a state of mind is merely escapist. The man who really cares for his fellows lives in the world, we shall be told."
To such inevitable criticism, Heard notes that "(i)t is necessary . . . to remind ourselves that this contemplation which is to be made the ordering purpose of our lives, is not an individual, withdrawn, ingrowing, hypnotic pleasure. It is the deliberate attempt to constitute evolution which is otherwise balked and arrested. It is a purposed plan to lead us out of our present impasse, to which unconscious growth and uncoordinated discovery have brought us, into the next stage of evolution, which is a higher degree of consciousness apprehending a larger and more relevant reality."
In prescient words that are evermore powerfully relevant today, as we face the challenges of global warming, energy depletion, desertification and massive species extinction, Heard notes that, "(w)hat is clear, even to those who have not reached this next step and sighted the way out, is that we certainly cannot stay where we are and as we are. Our individual selves, our culture, our society and our race - all are profoundly unstable and rapidly becoming more unstable."
"However we try to escape it," he observes, "we come back to the same point: we must go on or collapse."
"It is, then," Heard points out, "those who will not so recast their lives who are escapist, fleeing into social activity to escape thought, to escape the question, "Does my activity really solve the problem(s) Life has set me or is my business precisely in order to escape from answering the problem(s) which confront me?"
It is, Heard concludes, "(t)his extension of consciousness (that) can alone solve our present problem(s)."
In the attached far-ranging interview, Sufi teacher and author, Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee ("Love Is a Fire: The Sufi's Mystical Journey Home") discusses, in part, the relationship between science and religion from a Sufi perspective.
"Science and religion will become one," says Vaughan-Lee. "It is part of the next stage of human evolution. It has to do with the speeding up of the planet. It is actually very exact. It has to do with the question of speed. Spiritual things are a question of speed. The more spiritual, the quicker the vibration."
"And if you look at the life around us," he asks rhetorically, "why is it speeding up so much? What is the underlying reason? Because, as a mystic, you always look to the underlying reason. What is the underlying reason for our life speeding up to such a degree?"
"It is," Vaughan-Lee asserts, "so it can get near to the spiritual vibrations, so that the spiritual and everyday become one. Part of the science of the future will be to understand how the spiritual and the physical interrelate."
"As a mystic," Vaughan-Lee observes, "you see how things change first in the 'inner.' There is a law that everything that happens in life first constellates on the inner planes. If you do mystical practices, you will begin to see how things come into being. And the world as we know it inwardly has already ended. It is already over. . . . Somebody once said, "It is like the last dance on the Titanic.""
"There is," he notes, "a whole other level of evolution which I call evolution of 'Oneness' or 'global awareness.' . . . It is already setting the scenes for the next level of human evolution. . . . The Internet," he points out, "is a direct example of how 'Oneness' works, and how it is incredibly efficient and it is everywhere at the same time, and anybody (or anybody who has a computer) can have access to it. And it was just given to humanity, and it works. So the world as we know it has somewhere already ended."
"But it is our work," Vaughan-Lee cautions, "to bring this next evolution into being, because it needs human beings who can see beyond the debris of the civilization that is around us."
"If you look around with open eyes," he points out, "you see the debris of a dying or dead civilization."
"Responding to a radical crisis that threatens our very survival - this is humanity's challenge now. The dysfunction of the egoic human mind, recognized already more than 2,500 years ago by the ancient wisdom teachers and now magnified through science and technology, is for the first time threatening the survival of the planet. Until very recently, the transformation of human consciousness - also pointed to by the ancient teachers - was no more than a possibility, realized by a few rare individuals here and there, irrespective of cultural or religious background. A widespread flowering of human consciousness did not happen because it was not imperative."
"A significant portion of the world's population will soon recognize, if they haven't already done so, that humanity is faced with a stark choice: Evolve or die. A still relatively small but rapidly growing percentage of humanity is already experiencing within themselves the breakup of the old egoic mind patterns and the emergence of a new dimension of consciousness."
"Evolve or die." These are strong words, but they capture the essence of the stark choice that we have confronted ourselves with as the result of an ever burgeoning scientific technology unchecked by effective religious, spiritual or moral insight and actions. While virtually all of our ways of life have been fundamentally altered by our embrace of the last several centuries of technological change, it appears to be only now that the need for a wholesale change in the very nature of our consciousness is becoming readily apparent - or an evolutionary imperative, as Tolle notes.
While there is a plethora of material out there (including Tolle's powerful first book "The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment") describing what needs to be done to change one's level of consciousness, and how that might be achieved, it is by no means an easy challenge. Few truly evolutionary challenges are.
"If," writes philosopher Gerald Heard, "we are to advance through the evolution of consciousness beyond self-consciousness, to reunite consciousness now divided into the self-conscious and subconscious, and bring about a new and single quality of awareness and being, there is required of us a peculiar and rare quality of attention. It must be intense but without effort and strain. It must be that over-plus of evolutionary energy, which we call curiosity, and the German tongue calls Neuiger, the new appetite, raised to what Plato called illuminating wonder."
"Indeed," Heard observes, "because we are now so deeply prejudiced in favour of the assumption that it is only possible for one real experience to be presented to us, and that can only be the world of common sense, the necessary state of mind required for enlargement of consciousness must be one which is even without expectation."
"We are waiting for an experience of which we have no conception from the past," he points out, "and that being so, any clear expectation must distort or even completely inhibit a radically new awareness."
Fortunately, since Heard's time (he wrote those words in the dark days just before the onset of the Second World War), we have had breakthroughs in technology which have allowed those who have experienced equal breakthroughs in consciousness itself to intimately share their experiences (and methodologies) with us.
Below, are two teachers, the "neo-Buddhist" teacher Adyashanti and Tolle himself, sharing their integral teachings with us. Each shares the fundamental insight that there is an untapped, inherent state of higher consciousness within each of us.
"Three postulates are now generally accepted about man," Heard observes. "The first is that he is part of an evolutionary process which has gone on since the dawn of life. The second, that he is a culmination of that process."
"Never before," he points out, "has a single species spread over the entire land surface of the earth, dominated completely all other species, radically altered its environment by tools, instruments and machines and, passing beyond simple awareness, attained self-consciousness."
"The third postulate," he notes, "is that evolution progressively accelerates until, in man, it has reached its highest speed. This acceleration is so rapid that man, the final species, in his latest stages passes in a millennium through changes comparable to those which in dawn of life took a score million years."
"There are (also) two further postulates about which there is growing agreement among informed inquirers," Heard observes. "The first is that evolution has ceased in all other species; in man alone is further radical change possible. All the others have specialized: man is still unspecialized. The second of these postulates is that though man is, through his retention of an unspecialized condition, capable of further physical evolution, he does not seem to availed himself of this, his latent capacity. On the contrary, he appears to have kept himself "in solution" for an unprecedented time: indeed it might be said that he has, as far as bodily development is concerned, specialized in unspecialization."
"(M)an's development," Heard posits, "when it ceased to be physiological became psychological. His history is his specific evolution. He evolves mentally. Even if we had no record of what (mankind) has done since its physical evolution ceased, we might assume that it would be its intelligence which would expand. We should expect to find that this creature has produced a culture "projecting" on to its environment the energy which would otherwise have been expressed through further alterations in the creature's physique."
"This," he points out, "is to bring history under the general principles of natural history, to make civilization a development of biology, and to see culture as a continuation of a vital energy which, no longer manifesting itself in changes in physique, begins to express itself in discoveries of technique."
Thus, Heard notes, "(t)he first great stage of advance was the physical, the second was the technical, the third must be the psychical.
"The first," he points out, "is unconscious - blind; the second is conscious, unreflective, aware of its need but not of itself, of how, not why; the third is interconscious, reflective, knowing not merely how to satisfy its needs but what they mean and what the Whole means."
"When, then, we again change," Heard concludes, "this time from the technique phase of advance to the psychic, from indirect to direct expansion of understanding, at this point man's own self-consciousness decides and can alone decide whether he will mutate, and the mutation is instantaneous."
"(I)t is only in so far as man can intuitively or intentionally balance the growth of his mind, and understand himself as well as he understands his environment," says Heard, "that he can continue evolving and not relapse into the strangulated self-consciousness which gives him means without ends and powers without sanctions."
[Gerald Heard, "Pain, Sex and Time," Introduction, pp. xxviii-xxx]
The greatest change that a man or woman can effect is a change in the state of their consciousness and being. All external challenges fade into simplicity compared with this one internal challenge, yet an evolutionary change in the internal consciousness and being of mankind may be what is required to deal with the plethora of existential challenges which mankind faces now and the immediate future. As Einstein famously remarked: "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." Our collective challenges, therefore might only be resolvable with an evolutionary change in our collective consciousness.
"We must recall," writes Gerald Heard in "Pain, Sex and Time," his masterwork on the evolution of consciousness, "that the problem which has confronted man during history is how he may forward his evolution. He has unused still within him such pent vital energy that he can still evolve. His evolution, however, is no longer physical but psychical. If then he is to evolve, it will be through an extension of consciousness. His development demands such an extension because the world, as he now sees it with sharpened animal senses, gives him no sanction for using his immensely heightened animal powers. The guards of instinct have been removed, but the guidance of vision has not been gained."
Heard's book, originally published in 1939 (and republished in 2004), highlights the historical systems and methodologies that have been used down through the ages in an attempt to evolve human consciousness. Yet even as we have gained a broad and comprehensive understanding and mastery over our external world, as a species we have exhibited (it seems) but little mastery over the consciousness which is central to our being. Will this change of necessity? Will there be a conscious psychical evolution of consciousness itself?
In a probing inquiry that is just as relevant today - or, perhaps, more relevant now than ever - Heard asks: "If there is an evolutionary future for mankind, if humanity is to surmount its present impasse and enter on a new order, is that future for all, through a gradual infiltration of the light from the highest lit to the most dimly aware, or is it for the few who alone can take it in fully?"
"Is evolution," he asks, "to continue with its iron rule, 'many called, few chosen,' a minute number solving the Sphinx's riddle and the rest flung back into decadence and destruction? Is there to be progress, a pervasive salvation, a steady rise of each grade until all are ready for complete transformation, or do society and civilization end here and now and the few go on to an utterly different condition of consciousness?"
"Can evolution still be psycho-social," he asks, "or must it be now, if it is to continue at all, purely psychological? With self-consciousness do we attain the highest degree of consciousness compatible with life? Beyond that must the body become untenable, the blend of soul and flesh unviable?"
In the attached videos, a panel of spiritual teachers and philosophers - from the 'dean' of comparative religious studies, Huston Smith, to noted Islamic scholar, Professor Sayed Nasr and author/film-maker, Peter Russell - discuss theology, mysticism and how the 'Perennial Philosophy' that underpins the world's great wisdom traditions may help us to cope with the existential problems that humanity faces today.
Professor Nasr traces the use of the term the 'Perennial Philosophy' back to the 16th Century, and from there to Leibniz and a host of later philosophical writers. Sayed calls the 'Perennial Philosophy' a body of "non-historical truths that has survived over the ages concerning the nature of reality, of the ultimate divine reality, of cosmic reality, and of microcosmic reality . . . and which (has) manifested . . . in various great religious traditions in all their suppletive aspect, whether it be the Vedanta, or Islamic philosophy, or Mahayana or neo-Confucian philosophy in China, or Augustinianism and Thomism in the West."
Yet, it was Aldous Huxley who popularized the term in the modern West, writing his master work "The Perennial Philosophy," in which he traces the development of this recurring theme back through the writings of mystics and saints from all the world's great traditions.
While Huxley's "The Perennial Philosophy" is a comprehensive commentary on the philosophical and mystic insights into the nature of mankind's reality, it was in an introduction to another book, "The Song of God," written by his friends, Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda, where Huxley pithily summarized the 'Perennial Philosopy' in the following four points:
"At the core of the Perennial Philosophy," Huxley observes, "we find four fundamental doctrines.
First: the phenomenal world of matter and individualized consciousness - the world of things and animals and men and even gods - is the manifestation of a Divine Ground within which all partial realities have their beginning, and apart from which they would be non-existent.
Second: human beings are capable not merely of knowing about the Divine Ground by inference; they can also realize its existence by a direct intuition, superior to discursive reasoning. This immediate knowledge unites the knower with that which is known.
Third: man possesses a double nature, a phenomenal ego and an eternal Self, which is the inner man, the spirit, the spark of divinity within the soul. It is possible for a man, if he so desires, to identify himself with the spirit and therefore with the Divine Ground, which is of the same or like nature with the spirit.
Fourth: man's life on earth has only one end and purpose: to identify himself with his eternal Self and so come to unitive knowledge of the Divine Ground."
Commenting on the development of the 'Perennial Philosophy,' author and film-maker, Peter Russell, notes that "(f)or the first time in history we have access to all the world's spiritual traditions. If you had been born 200 years ago," he points out, "you would just have access to those in your particular culture, and the only teachers you would have would be any wise people that happened to be in your community. That was it, and perhaps reading books, but even then the books would have been from your own particular culture."
"Now we have access to the world and all its spiritual traditions," he points out, noting "(t)hat is what is going to take us into our next evolutionary phase." The idea of such an evolutionary shift is supported by a host of writers and philosophers, from the Jesuit paleontologist, Telihard de Chardin to Huston Smith, to cutting edge spiritual teachers Ken Wilber and Andrew Cohen, who teaches what he calls "Evolutionary Enlightenment."
Professor Nasr points out that "it is a time to pay attention to what the 'Perennial Philosophy' says about the nature of reality, because surely the present understanding of the nature of reality (and) post-modernism is presenting us with with immense challenges to put it mildly."
"It is strange," he notes, "that now we have only a few years to live on the earth if we do not change our relationship to the environment, that what we have been saying all along (in the 'Perennial Philosophy') is now taken much more seriously with a lot of people.
Yet ironically, while not wishing to be an alarmist, Professor Nasr points out that "the ambience is such that it is now much easier not to talk about these matters than it was fifty years ago." Nevertheless, he notes, discussion of what our ultimate purpose is, seems more than ever necessary if we are to face and overcome the challenges we have brought upon ourselves, if we are going to continue to evolve as a viable species here on Earth.
In the attached set of videos, cosmologist and integral thinker, Brian Swimme, teaches a cosmic history lesson which puts into perspective where we are today, given our newfound knowledge of the universe, our world and life itself. He then suggests a "new story" that will help us to evolve as an integral component of life on Earth, and to face the existential problems we have created for ourselves by adhering to "old stories" that no longer fulfill their purpose.
In the first video ("A New Story"), Swimme points out that the cultural stories that developed over the past thousands of years, useful as they were, are no longer really helpful in light of the knowledge that we now have about our history, origins and progress. It is time, he notes, for us to develop a "new story" that will serve us well, given the new information that we have about ourselves.
Video Two situates us where we are in the vast cosmological scheme of things, while Videos Three through Five trace the origin of the universe, the advent of life on earth, and our development as a species. For those well versed in these areas, these videos may be superfluous. Yet, Video Six ("The Present Moment") is a must-see video which puts the existential challenges we face - particularly the man-made phenomena of mass species extinction - into a perspective that is valuable for anyone seeking solutions to the problems created by our common humanity. Videos Seven through Ten, in turn, suggest how we can develop and enhance lifestyles and attitudes that are viable given the dynamic changes and challenges that we are living through.
Andrew Cohen, Editor-in-chief,
EnlightenNext magazine.
"Evolution," says spiritual teacher, Andrew Cohen, "really means we are part of a process that is going somewhere in time." In this, Cohen shares the view of a raft of spiritual teachers and philosophers from the Buddha to modern era sages like psychologist Richard M. Bucke, the Jesuit paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin and the polymath philosopher/author Gerald Heard.
"(But)," asks Cohen, "(t)o what degree are we actually aware of the fact that we are part of a process that is becoming more complex and more self-aware in time, and that our own experience of consciousness and cognition is the very leading edge of that movement?"
"It is very interesting," he notes, "especially for those of us that are interested in the evolution of consciousness and culture, that as we make heroic spiritual effort - as we make the spiritual effort to become more conscious (and) more self-aware - as a result of making that spiritual effort we begin to feel our own movement."
"For the evolutionarily enlightened individual," Cohen observes, "that perspective really points us back to ourselves. And it says: 'To what degree are we enabling and encouraging this process of evolution to occur within this evolving cosmos as a result of our own heroic efforts?' Because," he notes, "ultimately . . . especially at the next stage of human cultural development, the ultimate source of meaning and purpose for the individual is going to be found through how much we are actually contributing to the process of evolution that made it possible for us to be here."
Cohen's teaching of 'Evolutionary Enlightenment' is a modern perspective that picks up the metaphysical gauntlet thrown down to post-modern spiritual seekers by his lineage in the Advaita Vedanta. Cohen's evolutionary teaching at once gibes with what we now know of humanity's origins and challenges the spiritual seeker to become an active and conscious participant in the imperative we have to chart the next leap forward in humanity's cultural and spiritual development.
In the following video, Cohen re-contextualizes the traditional Bodhisattva's vow in addressing the question of what comes next for us.
"Your whole life, when you take it seriously," Cohen notes, "becomes an expression of spirit in action, because you realize that is the whole thing, that is what you are doing here, (and) that's the whole point of this existence. Without that, life doean't mean anything. Otherwise you are just living a materialistic life satisfying narcissistic and selfish desires (that) ultimately doesn't mean anything."
"We are the luckiest people that have ever been born," Cohen observes, "so we have a different burden. We have to get over our ego so we can take responsibility for our tremendous good fortune."
"Ultimately, what we need," Cohen notes, "is a moral, philosophical (and) spiritual approach to life that makes sense of it all, because the post-modern predicament . . . doesn't make any sense. (We) are highly developed, intelligent people that don't know what (we) are really doing here. When we find out absolutely what we are doing, then we can discover the kind of conviction that can get us out of the ego and into the (evolutionary) process."
"Saying 'yes' to evolution has very powerful spiritual implications for the individual, and it involves saying 'yes' to life in ways that we never really have before," Cohen concludes. "And then saying 'yes' to eternity, and (then) saying 'yes' to the future, we have to take responsibility for all of it; (and) that means we have to become 'God,' so to speak, both metaphorically and literally."
In a talk given by the late spiritual teacher, Jiddu Krishnamurti - at a time before the proliferation of personal computers, and a decade-and-a-half before the emergence of the Internet - Krishnamurti (who died in 1986) presciently examines what will happen when the computer outstrips man's intellectual capacities and computers and robots begin to replace human beings in the workplace, thereby depriving us of our occupations.
"The computer is going to outstrip man in his thought," Krishnamurti predicts. (A predicition coming ever nearer to realtity as leading-edge scientists begin to master the difficulties in creating 'artificial intelligence.)
"The computer," he predicts," is going to change the structure of society, (and) the structure of government. . . . This is not some fantastic conclusion . . . or fantasy," he observes. "This is actually going on now, of which we are not (necessarily) aware. "
"The computer can learn, invent, and as a mechanical intelligence, the computer is going to make employment of human beings practically unnecessary," he predicts. "Perhaps humans may have to work a couple of hours per day. These are all facts that are coming," he notes.
"You may not like it, you may revolt against it, but it is coming," he says. "(But) thought has invented it, and human thought is limited. But the mechanical intelligence of the computer is going to outstrip man. So what," he asks, "is a human being then?"
"There are concerns about a human being whose occupation is taken over by the computer (and) the robot etc.," Krishnamurti notes. "Then what becomes of the human?"
"What," Krishnamurti asks, "becomes of the human? We have been programmed biologically, intellectually emotionally, psychologically though millions of years, and we repeat over and over again the same patterns."
"We have stopped learning," he observes. "Whether the human brain that has been programmed for so many, many centuries, whether it is capable of learning and immediately transforming itself into a totally different dimension," is an open question, according to Krishnamurti.
Whether, and to what extent, we are capable of such a transformation, is a question which we all have to face - and a question we will face sooner rather than later, it seems.
As a highly complex, highly sophisticated and highly fragile species, says world historian David Christian in a recent Ted.com talk, it is important for us to realize the story of the universe, its complexity and our own fragility.
Despite the second law of thermodynamics (which says systems always move from a state of order to disorder, and not otherwise), "the Universe can create complexity, but with great difficulty," Christian observes. "In pockets there appear . . . 'Goldilocks conditions" - not too hot, not too cold, just right for the creation of complexity - and slightly more complex things appear. And where you have slightly more complex things," he observes, "you can get slightly more complex things. And in this way complexity builds, stage by stage."
"Each stage, Christian notes, "is magical because it creates the impression of something utterly new appearing almost out of nowhere in the universe. We refer to these moments in 'Big History' as 'threshold moments.' And at each 'threshold' the going gets tougher. The complex things get more fragile, more vulnerable; the 'Goldilocks conditions' get more stringent, and it is more difficult to create complexity."
"We, as extremely complex creatures," says Christian," desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity despite the Second Law, and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility."
Christian then explains the entire "Big History" of the universe in under fifteen minutes in an inspiring talk that puts together everything you ever learned in high school science in one big picture that explains both how we came to be here at this moment in time - and how vulnerable we are due to our complexity and our fragility at this, our own 'threshold' moment in history.
“Rhythm and harmony find their way into the secret places of the soul.”
-- Plato (426-348 BCE) --
The poets, philosophers and seers of the world's great wisdom traditions so often seem to have spoken directly to the truths in life which modern science is now confirming. Perhaps this indicates how the questions we have are universal and therefore frame the questions that science is most interested in answering; or, perhaps we have always sensed where the answers to our greatest questions lie, and science is just now getting around to investigate 'why' our answers 'are' what they are.
In a fascinating video account of how music affects us (embedded below), Dr. Annirudh Patel, of the Neurosciences Institute, looks at the intersection of the arts and science, in his investigation of where and how music and the brain interact "Interest in music and the mind," he notes, "is as ancient as philosophy itself."
Patel begins his account by referencing studies that show how music stimulates deep and evolutionarlily ancient structures in the brain, the same pain/pleasure structures associated with eating and sex. These structures, Patel notes, are triggered and release the feel-good neurotransmitter dopamine while an individual is listening to his or her favourite musical passages, the musical passages which give one a shiver or a tingle in their spine. "Somehow," Dr. Patel observes, "listening to instrumental music, a very abstract activity, is accessing the same brain structures as are behaviours important for our physical survival and reproduction."
Music, it turns out, not only stimulates both the ventral tagmental area and the nucleus accumbens, two ancient brain structures that are close to the amygdalla and the brain stem. But, Patel notes, music also activates a host of brain functions that are correlated to a host of other specialized regions throughout the brain, including regions related to emotion, memory, learning and plasticity, attention, motor control, pattern perception, imagery and many more. And the wide impact that music has on our brains may make it a portal into understanding the deeper questions of mind science.
Music, no less than language, is a defining trait of our species; universal to human beings, and unique to human minds; a controversial remark when one considers the song of the meadowlark or the nightingale. However, Patel notes, birds sing only at specific times and for specific reasons that are involved primarily with territoriality and reproduction, while humans in every culture make music in the widest of circumstances and for a myriad of reasons.
Displaying an image of a 35,000 year old flute made from the wing-bone of a swan in the late Pleistocene Age, Patel explores whether we have been shaped by other evolutionary strands to be musical, or whether other forces are at play. Just as language has a grammar and syntax, Patel notes, so does music, and these features of each may be related.
Just as there is a dysfunction resulting in the loss of language skills (i.e., aphaysia), there is also a lesser know dysfunction resulting in the loss of some portion of each individual's innate musical ability, amusia. And damage to any number of different brain regions can result in different forms of amusia, showing the complex and diverse physiology of our musical abilities.
In order to understand our linguistic and musical abilities, and their interrelatedness, Patel compares linguistic and musical 'anomalies' - glaring grammatical errors and off-key musical errors. Language and musical grammars it appears overlap in terms of the brain regions each utilizes. Patel found that professional musicians with highly sensitized musical regions who suffer aphaysia do not typically suffer amusia as well, while persons with normal musical abilities suffering aphaysia do suffer amusia, demonstrating that the "grammar functions" of language and music are closely related.
Interestingly, in comparing musical abilities across species, Patel notes that there are only a relatively few species that have achieved what he term "vocal learning' - that is, the ability to learn and produce complex vocal and/or musical patterns based on what is heard. These include humans, certain songbirds (including parrots), cetaceans (whales and dolphin), as well as some species of bats and seals. Notably, humans are the only primates to have developed vocal learning skills. Our closest relations amongst the world's varied species, the chimpanzees and binobos, appear to be devoid of this vocal learning ability.
Patel posits that by tapping into the innate ability of some species - particularly ours - to process and replicate music (or vocal sounds), neuroscience may be able to shed some light on the elusive question as to just how 'the mind' is related to 'the brain.' Music, he notes, engages many brain functions, is complex yet highly reducible, has its own grammar, and lends itself readily to studies of learning. Along with the ability to compare structure and functions of the brain across varied species, Patel holds out the hope that musical neuroscience can shed some light on the question of how the gray matter of the brain is somehow turned into that which each of us recognizes as 'mind.' And this, of course, is perhaps the question which haunts not only neurology, but key disciplines in biology, chemistry and physics.
Rhythm and harmony may, thus, indeed be the key into "the secret places" of our souls, as Plato so presciently observed millennia ago. And if so, it will help unravel a whole host of until now unanswerable questions, including why we appear to be the only species that seem capable of being not only conscious, but of being conscious of our consciousness; a question which, in and of itself, is a question worthy of Plato.
"Humanity faces the crisis of a divided consciousness," writes Dr. Robert Atkinson, Professor of Human Development and Religious Studies at the University of Southern Maine.
"A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways."
-- James 1:8 --
While this is not new, in and of itself - after all the problems of 'duality' and the seeming 'individuality' of the human ego have been addressed in virtually every one of the world's great wisdom or religious traditions - the problems that a "divided consciousness" presents in the age of instantaneous information and reaction are immense; and, it seems we are not facing these collective challenges, as yet. Rather, the reverse seems more likely to be true.
On the whole, it seems we tend to avoid life's basic existential questions, chief amongst them the "double nature" of man's consciousness, relegating such 'problems' to the backwaters of religious and metaphysical traditions that seem less and less relevant to the challenges we face on a daily basis.
"Our collective story is lagging behind, resisting the flow of evolutionary change," Atkinson observes. "The pre-twentieth-century story we have carried with us into the twenty-first century – built on the assumptions of duality, separation, and boundaries – has lost much of its meaning, power, and, most alarmingly, hope for the future. It faces crisis after crisis without offering any lasting resolution (and, the) once well-understood principle of continual progress toward a collectively desired and beneficial goal is missing."
"As we struggle through a time that begs for a momentous breakthrough," Atkinson asks, "will we let this crisis get the best of us, or will we midwife our current transformation-in-progress toward collective harmony and planetary sustainability?"
Atkinson identifies the following seven 'principles' which are universal, cross-cultural and found to varying degrees in all of the world's great religions and wisdom traditions:
1. Consciousness is a potentiality set in motion by a dynamic process. We are born with an inherent urge to understand reality, unfolding through our desire to make sense of life’s mysteries. Our fullest potential for consciousness is realized as we independently investigate the twin knowledge systems of science and religion while integrating our own life’s lessons.
2. Change is inevitable and necessary for evolution. On both the micro and macro levels, from algae to weather systems, the nature of everything is constant change. There can be no evolution without change. To navigate this time of unusually rapid change, of universal reformation, we need a transformation of consciousness, which will become the change agent for the evolution of civilization.
3. Growth by degrees is inherent to life. The pace of growth enables all life forms to evolve toward their potential. Historians, mystics, and developmental theorists understand that growth on the individual and collective levels is regulated by a creative, dynamic, universal force and designed to occur in a gradual and ordered progression.
4. Transformation occurs through the conscious confrontation of opposing forces. Individually and collectively, we participate in the inherent dialectic of life not only by being tested to our limits but also by being pushed beyond them to confront unknown realms. Just as change is necessary for evolution, so is transformation. The trials and tribulations of life have purpose; they are the cause of great advancement. Opposition is a catalyst for transformation and is essential for maintaining the law of balance in the universe.
5. Consciousness expands along an eternal continuum. Consciousness pervades all of creation; it’s at the heart of an interconnectedness that links all beings. Our consciousness of ourselves, each other, and the universe – our spiritual development – has been ever-evolving and increasing in complexity over time. Evidence for this includes an increasing capacity among many to think globally and identify themselves as world citizens.
6. Consciousness progresses toward unity. As we journey through our lives, we discover many viewpoints, experience many identities, and confront endless pairs of opposites. At some point we may even glimpse an inherent unity to it all, a hidden wholeness. This is not a fluke. Evolution has been leading us toward a more complex understanding of this mystery and toward a greater appreciation of our essential oneness.
7. Reality is a unified whole, and revelation is continuous. On the horizon of eternity, out from behind the illusion of the many, all veils pass away, and all that remains is the One. Only through the eyes of unity does reality appear as changeless yet evolving. Unseen but ever-present spiritual forces, revealed progressively and cyclically, have always been and still are being released, pushing evolution to higher levels of convergence, signaling humanity’s coming of age.
Atkinson's "principles," so reminiscent of Aldous Huxley's "Perennial Philosophy," holds out great hope for an evolutionary leap in both individual and collective consciousness, although they do not minimize the challenges we will face in getting there.
As Atkinson notes, "(t)he motifs and archetypes for a story of renewal and regeneration are embedded in these seven principles," which "operate on an evolutionary basis, both linearly and cyclically as well as individually and collectively."
"Do not be conformed to the world: rather
be transformed by the renewal of your mind."
-- Romans 12:2 --
"We meet each challenge along the continuum (of consciousness), he notes, "as we live within the world of opposites and take on a divided consciousness. Yet, in the end, he observes, "the final step brings us back to a consciousness of oneness when we recognize that reality is a unified whole."
"As more and more individuals come to understand the essential unity of humankind and begin to live accordingly," he concludes "our collective cultural and spiritual development will move ahead toward its next stage of maturity."
Yet, he notes, "(t)he awakening of a global consciousness, along with the acceptance of a global ethic, can only succeed when it is simultaneously linked to and understood as interdependent with the core principle of our time – the oneness of humanity."
If this principle is "affirmed as a common understanding," he observes "all will be in place for the practical organization of humanity into working relationships of oneness, harmony, and unity, which are the building blocks of world peace and prosperity."
And, he might add, only when such a common understanding of fundamental unity is affirmed, and such harmonious relationships have been forged, will we have fulfilled this next stage in our evolutionary potential.
Up to ten percent of respondents in the United Kingdom report having experienced what Cambridge Ph.D., Rupert Sheldrake, characterizes as "mystical experiences," though few are loathe to admit it. One respondent remarked that just as 'sex' was taboo in the Victorian Age, nowadays 'mysticism' is taboo as there is now an implicit fear that if one reports having undergone a mystical experience one might be thought of as "mad."
Sheldrake obtained a scholarship to study Natural Sciences at Clare College, Cambridge. He specialized in biochemistry, graduated with double-first-class honours, and won the University Botany Prize. He was awarded a Frank Knox fellowship to study philosophy and history at Harvard University, at around the time Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) was published, which he writes informed his view on the extent to which the mechanistic theory of life is just a paradigm. He returned to Cambridge, where he obtained his Ph.D. in biochemistry.
Sheldrake is, perhaps, most well-renowned for his work on morphogenetic fields and his theory of "morphic resonance," as well as for his online experiments on the sense of "telepathy" that morphic resonance gives to animals as well as humans. (Some of his most famous, puzzling, and implausible research results are published in his recent book, "Dogs Who Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home.")
In the following three-part audio podcast from Youtube (linked below), Sheldrake discusses and explains morphic resonance; while, in the attached video, Sheldrake talks to EnlightenNext founder, and editor-in-chief, Andrew Cohen, about the the significance that his research results and theories may hold for a better understanding of the evolution of consciousness and - possibly - for the evolution of the universe itself.
"The Extended Mind," part 1 of 3:
"The Extended Mind," part 2 of 3:
"The Extended Mind," part 3 of 3:
The "Sheldrake-Cohen Dialogue:"
In September 2005, Sheldrake received the Perrott-Warrick Scholarship for psychical research and parapsychology, which is administered by Trinity College, Cambridge. As a result, he is the current Director of the Perrot-Warrick Project, as well as the Academic Director for the Holistic Thinking program at The Graduate Institute Bethany, in Connecticut, U.S.A.
In the rising awareness of and interest in the transcendental - not just in the world's great wisdom traditions, but in science, religious institutions and our culture generally - perhaps the growing acceptance of (and acknowledgment by) the Catholic Church of the truth revealed by leading-edge science is one of the most promising signs that physics, metaphysics and psychology are at last coming to a common understanding (albeit in different terminology) that there is a single, transcendental Unity that undergirds our perceptions and conceptions of "reality."
In a post several years ago, we reported how the head of the Vatican Observatory acknowledged the 'Big Bang Theory' as the most likely explanation of the Creation, a position overwhelmingly more enlightened than that held by fundamentalist Christians, particularly so-called 'mainstream' fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant sects in the United States, that insist on the "literal truth" of the Bible, despite its inherent contradictions and C.S. Lewis' reported observation: "If we are going to talk about the Bible, let's all agree that it's a work intended for grown-ups, or not have the discussion at all."
Now, in an address on January 6, 2011, Pope Benedict (as reported by Reuters), took an even bolder, if not further, step in the direction of reconciling the Catholic faith with the findings of reason and logic. As Reuters notes, "(t)he Catholic Church no longer teaches creationism -- the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible -- and says that the account in the book of Genesis is an allegory for the way God created the world." Nevertheless, it still objects "to using evolution to back an atheist philosophy that denies God's existence or any divine role in creation."
But, perhaps most importantly, given the long running controversy over teaching evolution as opposed to creationism in U.S. public schools (or now Intelligent Design, a "politically correct" and watered-down version of creationism), the Church opposes "using the Book of Genesis as a scientific text."
"The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe," Benedict reportedly told the crowd in St. Peter's Basilica on the appropriately chosen feast day of the Epiphany. "Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God."
"In the beauty of the world, in its mystery, in its greatness and in its rationality," he continued, "we can only let ourselves be guided toward God, creator of heaven and earth."
Pope Benedict's timely remarks celebrating the Epiphany (the anniversary that Christians celebrate as the day that the Three Magis worshipped the infant Jesus) are part of a larger effort to bring the Catholic faith into the scientifically-informed 21st century. Part of that effort has included rehabilitating the ex-communicated Gallileo, the father of modern physics, and the speech, below, that Pope Benedict gave to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences' conference on "Scientific Insight into the Evolution of the Universe and of Life."
Reading the text of the Pope's remarks, one can only be impressed by the 'transcendental times' we are living in; a time when what was once the most conservative of Western institutions is addressing the roadblocks that have blocked it from recognizing the same 'Unity' that physics and psychology are rapidly moving towards.
In part, these are the remarks that Pope Benedict conveyed to the Vatican's own conference into the origin of life in the universe, on another appropriately chosen date - All Saints' Eve - October 31, 2008:
In this context, questions concerning the relationship between science’s reading of the world and the reading offered by Christian Revelation naturally arise. My predecessors Pope Pius XII and Pope John Paul II noted that there is no opposition between faith’s understanding of creation and the evidence of the empirical sciences. Philosophy in its early stages had proposed images to explain the origin of the cosmos on the basis of one or more elements of the material world. This genesis was not seen as a creation, but rather a mutation or transformation; it involved a somewhat horizontal interpretation of the origin of the world. A decisive advance in understanding the origin of the cosmos was the consideration of being qua being and the concern of metaphysics with the most basic question of the first or transcendent origin of participated being. In order to develop and evolve, the world must first be, and thus have come from nothing into being. It must be created, in other words, by the first Being who is such by essence.
"In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word
was with God, and the Word was God. The same was
in the beginning with God." John 1:1-2
To state that the foundation of the cosmos and its developments is the provident wisdom of the Creator is not to say that creation has only to do with the beginning of the history of the world and of life. It implies, rather, that the Creator founds these developments and supports them, underpins them and sustains them continuously. Thomas Aquinas taught that the notion of creation must transcend the horizontal origin of the unfolding of events, which is history, and consequently all our purely naturalistic ways of thinking and speaking about the evolution of the world. Thomas observed that creation is neither a movement nor a mutation. It is instead the foundational and continuing relationship that links the creature to the Creator, for he is the cause of every being and all becoming (cf. Summa Theologiae, I, q.45, a. 3).
To “evolve” literally means “to unroll a scroll”, that is, to read a book. The imagery of nature as a book has its roots in Christianity and has been held dear by many scientists. Galileo saw nature as a book whose author is God in the same way that Scripture has God as its author. It is a book whose history, whose evolution, whose “writing” and meaning, we “read” according to the different approaches of the sciences, while all the time presupposing the foundational presence of the author who has wished to reveal himself therein. This image also helps us to understand that the world, far from originating out of chaos, resembles an ordered book; it is a cosmos. Notwithstanding elements of the irrational, chaotic and the destructive in the long processes of change in the cosmos, matter as such is “legible”. It has an inbuilt “mathematics”. The human mind therefore can engage not only in a “cosmography” studying measurable phenomena but also in a “cosmology” discerning the visible inner logic of the cosmos. We may not at first be able to see the harmony both of the whole and of the relations of the individual parts, or their relationship to the whole. Yet, there always remains a broad range of intelligible events, and the process is rational in that it reveals an order of evident correspondences and undeniable finalities: in the inorganic world, between microstructure and macrostructure; in the organic and animal world, between structure and function; and in the spiritual world, between knowledge of the truth and the aspiration to freedom. Experimental and philosophical inquiry gradually discovers these orders; it perceives them working to maintain themselves in being, defending themselves against imbalances, and overcoming obstacles. And thanks to the natural sciences we have greatly increased our understanding of the uniqueness of humanity’s place in the cosmos."
