Buddha Nature: Empty Cognizant Capacity

The following is condensed from Tulke Urgyen Rinpoche's "As It Is," vol. II, chap. 1 ("The Inheritance"):

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Tulke Urgyen Rinpoche
1920-1996

"We think, we remember, we plan - and the attention thus exerted moves towards an object and sticks to it. This mental movement is called thinking or conceptual mind . . . extroverted consciousness unaware of its own nature. This ignorant mind grabs  hold of objects, forms concepts about them, and gets involved and caught up in the concepts it has created about them. This is the nature of samsara, and it has been continuing through beginningless lifetimes up to the present moment. 

This dualistic structure, together with the disturbing emotions and the karma that is produced through them, are the forces that drive us from one samsaric experience to another. 

(O)ur natural state is the indivisible unity of emptiness and cognizance. We miss the recognition because our mind is always searching somewhere else. . . . Shantideva said:"Unless you know the secret key point, whatever you do will miss the mark." The secret key point of mind is that its nature is a self-existing, original wakefulness. To identify the key point we need to receive the pointing-out instruction, which tells and shows us that: "The nature of your mind is the buddha mind itself."

Even though our nature is primordially enlightened, we are oblivious to that fact. Therefore we need to become re-enlightened. First, we need to recognize; next, train in that recognition; and finally, attain stability. Once we are re-enlightened, we no longer need to wander in samsara."

. . .

"The buddha nature is the very identity within which the body, speech, mind, qualities and activities of all buddhas are complete. . . . Our speech became wrapped within the movement of breath to become voice and words. It appears and disappears. Consciousness began to hold a perceiver as separate from the perceived. In other words, it became a fixation on duality, a stop-and-start process that arises and ceases each moment. Thoughts come continuously, one after the other, like an endless string. This endless string of thought has continued from beginningless time and just goes on and on. . . . While we are governed by this involvement in thought, we are truly helpless.

. . . If we truly recognize buddha nature, in that very same moment, any thought will vanish by itself, leaving no trace. This is what brings an end to samsara. . . . Once you recognize your own natural face, you have already transcended the six realms of samsara. . . . Receiving teachings on how to recognize the essence of mind and correctly apply them is called 'the Buddha placed in the palm of your own hand.' That analogy means that at the moment of being introduced and recognizing, you don't have to search for the enlightened state anywhere else.

. . . 

. . . Our buddha nature . . . is like a wish-fulfilling jewel. If we don't use this wish-fulfilling jewel, endless samsara lies before us. Isn't it just incredibly stupid to throw away our fortune - and troublesome too?

 . . . 

 However, like Jamgon Kongtrul said:

Although my mind is the Buddha, I don't recognize it.
Although my thinking is dharmakaya, I don't realize it.
Although nonfabrication is the innate, I fail to sustain it.
Although naturalness is the basic state, I am not convinced. 

We need to understand what mind essentially is. . . . (I)n this world, mind is the most important, for the simple reason that it is the mind that understands and experiences. . . . In truth, there is nothing other than mind that experiences. . . . A sentient being is basically made out of nothing other than mind. Apart from the mind, no thing in this world experiences anything at all.

The mind essence of sentient beings and the awakened mind of the buddhas is the same. Buddhahood means to be totally stable in the state before dualistic thought occus. A sentient being like ourselves, not realizing our essence, gets caught up in our own thinking and becomes bewildered. Still, the essence of our mind and the very essence of all awakened buddhas is primordially the same. Sentient beings and buddhas have an identical source, the buddha nature.

Buddhas become enlightened because of realizing their essence. Sentient beings become confused because of not realizing their essence. Thus there is one basis or ground, and two different paths.  

 (Emphasis added.)

A buddha is someone who recognizes the essence itself, and is awakened through that. A sentient being is someone who doesn't, and who is confused by his or her own thinking. . . . Thinking takes place because of not seeing the essence of this mind itself. It thinks of something, makes thoughts and emotions about it - the process goes on and on . . . like  beads on an endless string. This is called samsara.

It is the thinking that perpetuates samsara. Samsara will go on endlessly unless the thinking stops.

. . .

(I)f in this life we don't attain realization by recognizing our own nature, we will continue again in some other state within samsara. If we recognize and realize our buddha nature, we can go upwards to enlightenment. If we are careless and ignore it, we don't have to try to go deeper into samsara - it happens automatically. Negative karma doesn't require much effort. the normal mind thinks mainly in terms of being against something, being attached to something and not caring about anything. This automatically creates negative karma, further perpetuating samsara.

True virtue, real goodness, is created through recognizing our buddha nature, our natural state. Recognizing our own nature is itself the path of enlightenment. Not recognizing buddha nature is itself the path of samsara. . . . The basis for these two is the same: it is buddha nature. There are two choices, two paths. One is the path of knowing, the wakefulness that knows its own nature. One is the path of unknowing, of not recognizing our own nature, and being caught up in what is being thought of, through the consciousness connecting with sense objects via the senses. This process continuously puts the wheel of samsara in motion. That is why the famous statement goes:

To recognize is the path of nirvana;
Not to recognize is the path of samsara.

 There is knowing. The mind of any sentient being is both empty and cognizant, and it is the cognizance that can recognize its own nature. In the very moment of recognizing, you see the empty essence.

. . . 

Recognize your mind, and in the absence of any concrete thing, rest loosely. After a while we again get caught up in thoughts. But, by recognizing again and again, we grow more and more used to the natural state. . . . Through this process, our thought involvement grows weaker and weaker. The gap between thoughts begin to last longer and longer. At a certain point . . . there will be a stretch of no conceptual thought whatsoever, without having to suppress the thinking.

We need to train in slowly growing more and more used to the recognition of mind essence. This will dissolve our negative karma and disturbing emotions. In this recognition it is impossible to be tainted by karma and emotions, just like you cannot paint in mid-air.

All sentient beings are buddhas,
But they are covered by temporary obscurations.

 This temporary obscuration is our thinking. If we didn't already have the buddha nature, meaining a nature that is identical to that of all awakened ones, no matter how much we try we would never become enlightened.

William James: On 'Inner Religion'

Wm. James
(1842-1910)

In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James, one of the acknowledged "fathers" of modern psychology, distinguished between outer and inner religious faith. To him, "outer religion" was the province of rituals, sacraments, vestments and bells, while "inner religion" was a state of consciousness. In the true sense of the word, he viewed "inner religion" (from the Latin ligare, meaning to 'tie' or 'unite') as a state of natural, unitive and acceptive consciousness in which "religion comes to our rescue and takes our fate into her hands."

"There is a state of mind, known to religious men, but to no others," he observes, "in which the will to assert ourselves and hold our own has been displaced by a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the folds and waterspouts of God."

"In this state of mind," he notes, "what we most dreaded has become the habitation of our safety and the hour of our moral death has turned into our spiritual birthday. The time for tension in our soul is over, and that of happy relaxation of calm deep breathing, of an eternal present, with no discordant future to be anxious about, has arrived. Fear is not held in abeyance as it is by mere morality, it is positively expunged and washed away."

"This enchantment," he points out, "coming as a gift when it does come - a gift or our organism, the physiologists will tell us, a gift of God's grace, the theologians say - is either there or not there for us, and there are persons who can no more become possessed by it than they can fall in love with a given woman by mere word or command."

"Religious feeling is thus an absolute addition to the Subject's range of life," he concludes. "It gives him a new sphere of power. When the outward battle is lost, and the outward world disowns him it redeems and vivifies an interior world which otherwise would be an empty waste." "There are plenty of men," he adds parenthetically, "in whose religious life this rapturousness is lacking. They are religious in the wider sense; yet in this acutest of all senses they are not so."

[Wm. James, "The Varieties Of Religious Experience," pp. 47-48.]

Aldous Huxley: On the Perennial Philosophy and the Ground of Being

" . . . (T)here is a hierarchy of the real. The manifold world of our everyday existence is real with a relative reality that is, on its own level, unquestionable; but this relative reality has its being within and because of the absolute Reality, which, on account of the incommensurable otherness of its eternal nature, we can never hope to describe, even though it is possible for us directly to apprehend it."

-- Aldous Huxley --

("The Perennial Philosophy," page 33.)

Just to the extent that we mistake our "relative reality" with "absolute Reality" do we suffer. That is the nature of samsara, the unawakened life. Our identification with the unawakened "self" of our normal, workaday consciousness obscures the consciousness of the true "Self" which is co-extant with the Ground of Being. The object of the Buddha's 'Eight-Fold Path to the End of Suffering' - the fourth of the Four Noble Truths - is, like all true spiritual teachings, to bring us to a unitive knowledge of this Ground of Being.

In his Introduction to "The Song of God," a translation of the Bhagavad Gita by his frineds Christopher Isherwood and Swami Prabhavananda, the polymath author and philosopher, Aldous Huxley, outlines "the Perennial Philosophy" underlying the world's great spiritual traditions, a philosophy which points to our ability to realize the ineffable Ground of Being.

"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."

 "Direct knowledge of the Ground (of Being) cannot be had except by union," Huxley notes, "and union can be achieved only by the annihilation of the self-regarding ego, which is the barrier separating the "thou" from the "That.""  The ego, or smaller "self" is, thus, the face and identity of the "relative reality" which obscures our higher consciousness, while "the Self" of the divine "Ground of Being" is the higher consciousness which enables us to experience (although not describe) true "Reality."

"Thou art that," we read over and over again in the Upanishads, and in other Scriptures. "Tat tvat asi."

One-On-One with Adyashanti

In a far-ranging, in-depth interview Renate McNay, co-host of Conscious TV, explores the life and experiences of neo-Buddhist teacher Adyashanti. Starting from his childhood spiritual inklings, McNay draws out the story of this popular author and teacher's ongoing spiritual awakening.

Particularly interesting, for those who may have experienced their own awakening and yet continue their search for ultimate enlightenment, Adyashanti describes a plethora of ever-deepening experiences after what he calls "the honeymoon of awakening" wore off. Not for the faint-hearted, perhaps, Adyashanti explores the depths that exist beyond "the perfume of self" and describes (as far as such experiences can be described) what happened to him as he entered into what McNay describes as "the Divine Coma."

Trying to illustrate what happened when "consciousness completely woke up," Adyashanti describes it as being "like the 'knowing' that was dawning then was that 'knowing' arises from 'this,'  (then) that 'oneness' arises from 'this,' (and then) that 'knowing of oneness' arises from 'this.'" It is, he says, as if one experienced an infinity of nothingness and then got rid of the nothingness itself.

"What I would call the ultimate," says Adyashanti, "is that which is inconceivable, unexperiencable, it cannot come into any of the categories we usually put it in."

"If you take something and you then you take absolute emptiness, nothingness, and then you go really completely outside of duality - something and nothing - what," he asks, "is there when there is not even nothing?" Neither mind, nor experience, nor imagination can go there, he notes. But yet, he notes 'it' is there. "If there is a defining characteristic," says Adyashanti, "it is the 'unknowability' that is the defining characteristic."

And yet, Adyashanti points out, having realized this ultimate ground of being, the experiences of an ever-deepening understanding do not stop. "'It' itself has an infinite capacity to reveal itself," he notes. "We can call that revealing of itself  'deepening,' 'never-ending,' or as the Buddhists would say, 'always being, always becoming.'" "There is," he concludes, "never more nor less of it."

The Ego, Identification and Attachment

Psychologically, the lower consciousness of the ego may perhaps be viewed as a learned attitude, an habitual way of thinking that the individual grows into as he or she grows towards adolescence. By adolescence, the vast, vast majority of individuals have taken the stream of thought generated by the ego as their identity.

Wholly identified with this "voice in the head" we are attached to the personas it creates for us, and then seek, in turn, further attachments to objects, conceptual structures, experiences and other people to reinforce this attachment to our egoic "self." This attachment process, robs us of the reality of the higher levels of consciousness which are nascent within us, but which are obscured by the wiles and wants of the ego.

"Whatever the ego seeks and gets attached to are substitutes for the Being that it cannot feel," writes Eckhart Tolle in "A New Earth," his best-selling treatise on higher consciousness. "You can value and care for things," he observes, "but whenever you get attached to them you will know it's the ego. And you are never really attached to a thing but to the thought that has 'I,' 'me,' or 'mine' in it. Whenever you completely accept a loss, you go beyond ego and who your are, the I Am which is consciousness itself, emerges."

"In the end," it has been said," what matters most is how well did you live, how well did you love, and how well did you learn to let go."

Letting go, however, necessitates our letting go of the egoic state, not only of our identification with he ego, but with the never-ending attachments and desires that the ego produces, the subject of the reading by Tolle, below.

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Alan Watts: A Modern Vedantist Examination of the "I"

In "The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are," philosopher Alan Watts examines the delusionary way in which each of us looks as him or herself as a separate "ego" or "self" and the implications this has for society's development and its future. Critically examining the way that all of us are conditioned in this belief, Watts presents an Advaita Vedantist view on the question of our consciousness with a decidedly modern twist.

"The sensation of "I" as a lonely and isolated sense of being is so powerful and commonsensical, " Watts notes, "and so fundamental to our modes of speech and thought, to our laws and social institutions, that we cannot experience selfhood except as something superficial in the scheme of the universe."

"I seem to be a brief light that flashes but once in all the aeons of time," he observes, "a rare, complicated and all-too-delicate organism on the fringe of biological evolution, where the wave of life bursts into individual sparkling, and multicolored drops that gleam for a moment only to vanish forever. Under such conditioning it seems impossible and even absurd to realize that myself does not reside in the drop alone, but in the whole surge of energy which ranges from the galaxies to the nuclear fields in my body. At this level of existence "I" am immeasurably old; my forms are infinite and their comings and goings are simply the pulses or vibrations of a single and eternal flow of energy."

 "As the ocean 'waves,'" notes Watts, "so the universe 'peoples.'"

For more on this topic: See "Einstein to Alan Watts and Beyond: Who Are We?"

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Karlfried Graf Von Durckheim: On Contemplative Practice

"In order to reconize the reality of this experience of Greater Being, we need nothing more than the 'sacred sobriety' of common sense. This, in fact, is that transcendental realism which is neither clouded nor inhibited by preconceived concepts and rational thought structures. This sense of reality permits the unique, unclassifiable quality of the experience to be as it is, accepts and savours it, and because of its very incomprehensibility, is intuitively convinced of its truth."

"We need to practice in order to acquire the possibility of recognizing the quality of this reality. By remaining alert and constantly prepared, we can learn to hear and feel the call of Divine Being in everything that happens to us. For this we need to work diligently in order to become vessels capable of receiving all that is poured into them. And this practice remember, must not only begin but also end the day. 'Learn to live each day to its end in such a way that it becomes a part of Eternity,' as the poet says."

"We need a new kind of discipline here, one that aims so to develop our inner experience that it is lifted to a higher level. The results of such discipline come not from the sort of practice that is the mere carrying out of specific exercises, but from one that confirms the old saying: 'Each moment is the best of all opportunities.' Thus all things and all events become the field of practice on our journey along the Inner Way. Moving ever onward and keeping in touch with his inner essence, a man transforms himself step by step, into a 'person.' whose transparence to Divine Being makes possible the fulfillment of his human destiny."

-- Karlfried Graf Von Durckheim --
("The Way of Transformation: Daily Life as Spiritual Practice," p. 31.)

"It is a truism," notes Graf Von Durckheim, a practically-minded and modern mystic, "that all work, all art and all professional activity require practice if they are to succeed. This we accept, and in order that we may establish ourselves in the world, it is obvious that we must be at pains in all our vocations, avocations and transactions to practice and assimilate experience. We do not realize, however, that the success of man's most important task - infinitely more essential than any of his arts or professions - also depends upon practice."

"The destiny of everything that lives is that it should unfold its own nature to its maximum possibility," he points out. "Man is no exception. But he cannot - as a tree or a flower does - fulfill his destiny automatically. He is only permitted to become fully what he is intended to be when he takes himself in hand, works on himself, and practices ceaselessly to reach perfection."

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Karlfried Graf Von Durckheim (October 24, 1896 – December 28, 1988) was a strange amalgam of old and new, nobility and modernity, public and private, Western and Eastern. A Bavarian nobleman and professor, he was appointed as a foreign envoy from Nazi Germany to Japan immediately before World War II, where he was exposed to Zen teachings. Interned for a year and a half in Japan's Sugamo prison after the war, he practiced intensive zazen meditation, before returning to Germany and starting a career as a psychoanalyst and spiritual teacher.

Along with psychologist Maria Hippius, Dürckheim founded the "Center of Existential and Psychological Formation and Encounter" in the early 1950s. "What I am doing is not the transmission of Zen Buddhism," he asserted, "on the contrary, that which I seek after is something universally human which comes from our origins and happens to be more emphasized in eastern practices than in the western."

His "Initiation Therapy" dealt with the encounter between the profane, mundane, "little" self — the ego and super-ego — and the true Self. "The therapist is not the one who heals, that is, who intervenes with his own skills," he observed, "he is a therapist in the original meaning of the word: a companion on the way."

(Source: Wikipedia.)

The Big Questions of Our Origin

The Buddha refused to answer certain questions, most famously among these "unanswerables" were the questions of God and the origins of the universe. He likened the need for answers to such imponderables to that of a man shot through with an arrow who wants to know all the details of the man who shot him, together with all information about the bow and the arrow itself, before he will let the arrow be removed. Far better, the Buddha reasoned, to first remove the arrow which causes the man's suffering. Thus, the Buddha largely restricted his teachings to explanations of the Four Noble Truths: the truths of suffering, the cause of suffering, the end of suffering, and the path to the end of suffering.

Mahayana Buddhism (as opposed to its Therevavadan forerunner) has, however expanded its breadth to look into the causes of ultimate origin etc. Mahayana Buddhism's most famous contemporary teacher, the Dalai Lama, with his wide embrace of Western scientific findings within the context of the Buddha's teachings, made the following observations on man's evolution and the question of ultimate origination:

"Human beings took five billion years to develop to their present human state. For three to four billioins of years there was not life; only some basic, primary cells. In spite of human evolution, the question still remains: why did the whole universe or galaxy come into existence at all? What is the reason? We could say there is no reason or that it suddenly happened, but that answer is not satisfactory."

"Another answer is that it was the creator' or God's doing. However, this view does not hold true for Buddhist and Jain philosophies. The Buddhist answer is that it came into existence as a result of the karma of the beings who would utilize these galaxies. Take the example of a house. A house exists because there is a builder who constructs it so that it can be used. Similarly, because there were sentient beings to inhabit or utilize this galaxy, their karma produced the galaxy."

"We cannot explain this on a physical basis, only on the basis of the continuation of mind. The most subtle consciousness or mind has no beginning and no end. That is the ultimate nature. I am not talking about the ultimate nature here. Even on the conventional level, ultimate nature is something that is pure. The grosser mind with its basis of consciousness has its own ultimate nature which is pure."

[The Dalai Lama, "Transformed Mind," pp. 12-13.]

The Dalai's decidedly modern comments, are markedly similar to those of Andrew Cohen, a post-post-modern spiritual teacher and his scientifically grounded teachings on evolutionary enlightenment.

"(E)nlightenment, in the traditional, premodern sense," Cohen observes, "is about discovering unconditional freedom through awakening to this empty ground of limitless being, this eternal self, and abiding there constantly. And ultimately, it's not so different from the Western religious model, in which eternal salvation is found in a beatific heaven realm beyond the world. In both traditional Eastern wisdom and Western religious faith, the ultimate goal is a final state - a transcendent state of consciousness or a heavenly abode - that promises release from this world."

"(I)t's important to understand," Cohen notes, "that at the time when these great traditions flowered, people had a very different understanding of the context in which they were living. For example, in the East, where the concept of enlightenment was born, it was believed that history moved in continuously recurring cycles, like a merry-go-round turning round and round, eternally repeating the same processes. For one who "awakened" in that context, the path to liberation and salvation would be obvious: to get off the "wheel" of incarnate existence so one could dwell in the bliss, freedom, and eternal peace of the formless realm beyond time and space - forever."

"But," he notes, "we've moved on. We've learned a lot over the last few thousand years about who we are and about the context in which we have emerged. And one of the most important things we've discovered is that the movement of time is not cyclical, but a linear development process. Fourteen billion years ago, a tremendous energy burst forth from the void, and over time evolved from light to matter. And with the emergence of life, consciousness entered into the stream of time. Life and consciousness are one, and the greater the complexity of the life form, the greater is its capacity for consciousness."

"What is so miraculous about human beings," Cohen points out, "is that because of our highly evolved brain, we have the unique capacity to know that we know. In human awareness, consciousness has gained the capacity to know itself and everything that exists within it, including the evolutionary process that gave rise to that very capacity."

Taken together, both the Dalai Lama's and Cohen's decidedly modern takes on traditional enlightenment teachings, point - as science does  - to the primacy of consciousness, and the importance that consciousness itself will play in our further evolution if we are to survive as a species.

Gerald Heard: Conscious Evolution as Life's Focus

"(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)."

[Heard, "Pain, Sex and Time," pp. 178-179.]

The Evolution of Consciousness: A Global Imperative

"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."

-- Eckhart Tolle --
("A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose")

"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."

[Gerald Heard, "Pain, Sex and Time," pp. 164-165.]

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.

Beyond Desire to Spiritual Awakening

"When a man surrenders all desires that come to the heart and by the grace of God finds the joy of God, then his soul has indeed found peace. He whose mind is untroubled by sorrows, and for pleasure has no longings, beyond passion and fear and anger, he is the sage of the unwavering mind."

-- The Bhagavad Gita, 2:55-56 --

"Spiritual experience," writes famed translator, Jose Mascaro, "is the only source of true spiritual faith, and this must never contradict reason, or as Shankara, c. AD 788-820, says in his commentary of the Bhagavad Gita: 'If a hundred scriptures should declare that fire is cold or that it is dark, we would suppose they intend quite a different meaning from the apparent one!'"

"What," he then asks, "is the indispensable condition for this spiritual experience? It is very simple, and it can be very difficult: it is the absence of desires."

[Mascaro, "Bhagavad Gita (Penguin Classics)," p. li.]

But, the question remains: How will we know when we have mastered desires?

In his treatise, "On Desire: Why We Want What We Want," author, William Irvine observes that when we have mastered desire, "(w)e will experience what . . . has been the goal of most of those who have thought about desire - a feeling of tranquility."

"This should not be confused with the kind of tranquility brought on be ingestion of a tranquilizer," he cautions. Rather, he notes, "(i)t is instead marked by a sense that we are lucky to be living whatever life we happen to be living - that despite our circumstances no key ingredient of happiness is missing."

"With this sense," Irvine observes, "comes a diminished level of anxiety: we no longer need to obsess over the things - a new car, a bigger house, a firmer abdomen - that we mistakenly believe will bring lasting happiness if only we can obtain them. Most importantly," he points out, "if we master desire, to the extent possible to do so, we will no longer despise the life we are forced to live and will no longer daydream about living the life someone else is living; instead, we will embrace our own life and live it to the fullest."

[Irvine. "On Desire: Why We Want What We Want," pp. 6-7.]

The "desireless realm" described by the Buddha, and so many others, is thus, a universal spiritual state of being described in all of the world's great wisdom traditions. In the New Testament, for example (at Matthew 6:27-34), Jesus addresses our overwhelming desires and worries, observing:

"And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith!"

“Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you. So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own."

"(T)he time and effort we spend trying to master desire," Irvine suggests, "are probably considerably less than the time and effort we will expend if we instead capitulate to our desires and spend our days, as so many do, working incessantly to fulfill whatever desire floats into our head."

"Do thy work in the peace of Yoga and, free from selfish desires," says the Gita (at 2:48), be not moved in success or in failure. Yoga is evenness of mind - a peace that is ever the same."

The Further Evolution of Man

In 1939, polymath philosopher Gerald Heard's "Pain, Sex and Time: A New Outlook on Evolution and the Future of Man" was first published. Long out-of-print, it was republished in 2004 with a new Foreword by Huston Smith, the dean of comparative religious studies in America. In many ways, Heard's work (along with that of his friend, Aldous Huxley) set the stage for the counter-cultural revolution of the 1960s, a revolution fuelled by the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam but aimed at a new understanding and expansion of our consciousness and being.

That such an expansion (or dilation) of consciousness is not only possible, but is the inevitable next step in mankind's evolutionary path was the central tenet of much of Heard's work. In "Pain Sex and Time," Heard traces the historical path that the enlargement of human consciousness has undergone, and makes the case that further evolution will necessarily be psychological rather physical.

. . . . . . . . . . . . .

"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 Further Evolution of Consciousness

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?"

Carl Jung: Religious Experience and the Unconscious

According to the great Swiss psychologist, Carl Jung - the "Einstein of the mind" - the individual is born with an inherent disposition that becomes masked by the ego as he or she matures. And it is only by penetrating through the ego's mask that he or she discovers what and who she is. The danger, however, is that in doing so one will inevitably find a certain kind of madness.

In the lengthy video interview, attached, Jung observes that

"Man has a certain pattern that makes him specifically human, and no man is born without it." 

"We are only deeply unconscious of these facts" Jung notes, "because we live all by our senses and outside of ourselves. If a man could look into himself, he could discover it. And when a man discovers it, in our days, he thinks he's crazy . . . and really crazy."

Jung's view was that without some real, inner religious experience, the madness of the human ego could and would drive the individual actor to the depths of madness, a view that is readily understandable given the collective insanity witnessed by Jung during the first half of the twentieth-century. In candid correspondence written in the last year of his life, Jung observed:

"I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world, leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition, if it is not counteracted either by real religious insight or by the protective wall of human community. An ordinary man, not protected by an action from above and isolated in society cannot resist the power of evil, which is called very aptly the Devil. But the use of such words arouse so many mistakes that one can only keep aloof from them as much as possible."*

Carl G. Jung
(1875-1961)

The existential question for Jung, then, was: "Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving into the crowd?"

"To this question," he remarked, "there is a positive answer only when the individual is willing to fulfill the demands of rigorous self-examination and self-knowledge. If he follows through his intention, he will not only discover some important truths about himself, but will also have gained a psychological advantage: he will have succeeded in deeming himself worthy of serious attention and sympathetic interest. He will have set his hand, as it were, to a declaration of his own human dignity and taken the first step towards the foundations of his consciousness - that is, towards the unconscious, the only accessible source of religious experience."

"This is not to say," Jung cautions, "that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is the medium from which the religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such an experience may be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem."

[Jung, "The Undiscovered Self, pp. 101-102]

* Letter from Carl Jung to Bill Wilson (co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous), dated January 30, 1961. Jung died on June 6, 1961.

Virtue, Delusion and Mental Awareness: A Buddhist Perspective

"I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, it is no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. For I know that good itself does not dwell in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing."

[Romans 7:15-19]

The question of virtue - doing what is right and true to one's inner being - was tackled, and masterfully explained by Geshe Kelsang Gyatso in his landmark book, "Understanding the Mind." Essentially, he says, virtuous action results from a virtuous mental awareness rooted in our Buddha nature, while non-virtuous action is the result of a delusionary mindset. End the delusions, he notes, and one will end all non-virtuous action. But that is where it gets somewhat complicated. . . .

"All non-virtue arises from delusions," Geshe Kelsang observes, "and delusions arise from four causes: the root, the seed, the object, and inappropriate attention."

"The root of all delusions" he notes, "is self-grasping, the seed of a delusion is a potential left on the mental continuum by similar delusions in the past that acts as the substantial cause of that delusion; the object is any contaminated object; and inappropriate attention is a mental factor that focuses on the object in a mistaken way and acts as a co-operative cause of delusions. For a delusion to arise," he states, "all four causes are necessary."

"In reality," Geshe Kelsang notes, "the causes of delusion exist within the mind, not the body. For this reason Nagarjuna said that physical asceticism is not very important. To overcome delusions we need the mental asceticism of practices such as meditation and patience."

"The easiest way to prevent delusions from arising," he observes, "is to stop inappropriate attention by not allowing our mind to dwell on and exaggerate the attractive or unattractive features of contaminated objects. In this way," he says, we shall be able temporarily to prevent delusions."

"However," he notes, "to eradicate (delusions) completely we must abandon their root, self grasping, by attaining (to be) a yogic direct perceiver realizing emptiness. Once we have attained a direct realization of emptiness, we shall gradually eradicate the seeds of all the delusions."

"We eradicate the seeds of all intellectually-formed delusions on the path of seeing," Geshe notes, "and the seeds of all innate delusions on the path of meditation."

Thomas Merton, Ecumenism and the Fruit of Contemplation

Thomas Merton
(1915-1968)

The word "contemplate," meaning "to view with attention" is derived from the Latin 'con + templum' signifying "an open space for observation." Thus, the modern contemplative - like the near-enlightened Trappist monk, Thomas Merton - might be seen as the person whose mind provides him or her the open space for the observation of the realities of consciousness and being that exist beneath the external 'realities' of our common lives.

In his book, "Mystics and Zen Masters" (as well as in the attached video),  Merton examines the depth and commonality of this open, contemplative experience, and discusses what the "ecumenism" of religions revealed by a common contemplative life has to offer as an aspiration for the non-contemplative.

"(G)enuine ecumenism," writes Merton, "requires the communication and sharing, not only of information about doctrines which are totally and irrevocably divergent, but also of religious intuitions and truths which may turn out to have something in common, beneath surface differences."

"Ecumenism," he observes, "seeks the inner and ultimate spiritual "ground" which underlies all articulated differences. A genuinely fruitful dialogue cannot be content with a polite diplomatic interest in other religions and their beliefs. It seeks a deeper level, on which religious traditions have always claimed to bear witness to a higher and more personal knowledge of God that that which is contained simply in exterior worship and formulated doctrines."

"In all religions," he notes, "we encoutner not only the claim to (divine) revelation in some form or other, but also the record of special experiences in which the absolute and final vailidity of that revelation is in some way attested."

"Furthermore," he points out, "in all religions it is more or less generally recognized that this profound "sapiential" experience, call it gnosis, contemplation, "mysticism," "prophecy," or what you will, represents the deepest and the most authentic fruit of the religion itself. All religions, then, seek a "summit" of holiness, of experience, of inner transformation to which their believers - or an elite of believers - aspire because they hope, so to speak, to incarnate in their own lives the highest values in which they believe.

In the following video, a letter which Merton addressed to one of his many correspondents is used to highlight the fruit of the gnostic consciousness that is experienced by the true contemplative - a higher consciousness which is available to us all, regardless of religious tradition.

Retrospection and Introspection: Theology, the Perennial Philosophy and Our Existential Challenges

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.

Teilhard de Chardin: A Recollection and Rememberance

Fr. George Lemaitre
(1894-1966)

After the irony of it being a Jesuit priest, Georges Lemaitre, who first proposed the 'Big Bang' theory, it seems only fitting that another Jesuit, Telhard de Chardin, a paleontologist, would set out a noetic perspective of man's evolution. Both priests (even though de Chardin was banned from having his later writings published until after Vatican II) laid the grounds for a new ecumenical movement that has seen the Catholic Church embrace both the 'Big Bang' and evolution as the most likely processes of creation - an embrace that may perhaps be seen as being equalled only by Luther's protest against the Pope as a turning point in Christian theology and practice.

The work of Lemaitre, who was trained as a mathematician and physicist, has been viewed as less controversial than de Chardin's; perhaps because Lemaitre limited his work primarily to physics and did not propose any new broad and sweeping theological systems, and partly because his work was quickly recognized and built upon by greater public figures, such as Edwin Hubble, in an era (the first decades of the twentieth-century) when the world's understanding of physics was transforming rapidly in view of the simultaneous development of both relativity and quantum theory.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
(1881-1955)

Teilhard de Chardin's work, on the other hand, was viewed with a fuller skepticism by the Church hierarchy from the very start, directly challenging - as it did - the Church's teachings on the origin of man and its teachings on 'original sin.' As a result, de Chardin was banished to China for much of his life and career (where he helped in the discovery of 'Peking Man'), and his writings (including his classic works, "The Phenomenon of Man" and "The Future of Man") were barred from publication during his lifetime.

In "The Future of Man," de Chardin observed, in part:

"When observed through a sufficient depth of time (millions of years) Life can be seen to move. Not only does it move but it advances in a definite direction. And not only does it advance, but in observing its progress we can discern the process or practical mechanism whereby it does so."

"These," he writes, "are three propositions which may be briefly developed as follows:

(a) Life Moves. This calls for no demonstration. Everyone in these days knows how greatly all living forms have changed if we compare two moments in the earth's history sufficiently separated in time. In any period of ten million years Life practically grows a new skin.

(b) In a definite direction. . . . While accepting the undeniable fact of the general evolution of Life in the course of time, many biologists still maintain that these changes take place without following any defined course, in any direction and at random. This contention, disastrous to any idea of progress, is refuted, in my view, by the tremendous fact of the continuing 'cerebralisation' of living creatures. Research shows that from the lowest to the highest level of the organic world there is a persistent and clearly defined thrust of animal forms towards species with more sensitive and more elaborate nervous systems. A growing 'innervation' and 'cerebralisation' of organisms: the working of this law is visible in every living group known to us, the smallest no less than the largest. . . . What else can this mean except that, as shown by the development of nervous systems, there is a continual heightening, a rising tide of consciousness which visibly manifests itself on our planet in the course of time?

(c) (T)he underlying process whose existence we can perceive in this continual heightening of consciousness (signifies) . . . that Cosmic Matter, governed at is lower end (as we already know) by forces of dispersal which slowly cause it to devolve into atoms, now shows itself to be subjected, at the other end, to an extraordinary power of enforced coalescence, of which the outcome is the emergence, pari passu, of an ever-increasing amount of spiritual energy that is ever more powerfully synthesized."

"The greatest discovery made in this century," de Chardin writes," is probably the realisation that the passage of Time may best be measured by the gradual gathering of Matter in superposed groups, of which the arrangement, ever richer and more centralized, radiates outwards from an ever more luminous fringe of liberty and interiority."

"The phenomenon of growing consciousness on earth," he notes, "in short, is directly due to the increasingly advanced organisation of more and more complicated elements, successively created by the working of chemistry and of Life."

"At the present time," he concludes, "I can see no more satisfactory solution of the enigma presented to us by the physical progress of the Universe."

[Teilhard de Chardin, "The Future of Man," pp. 67-69.]

In the following video, renowned spiritual teacher Jean Houston recounts to Deepak Chopra how, as a teenager growing up in Manhattan, she was befriended and taught by an elderly de Chardin who passed on to her his vision of the Earth as a 'noosphere' embued throughout with consciousness.