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.

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"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]

Emptiness, Oneness and Reality: Where Buddhism and Science Converge

"Buddhism has all the characteristics of what would be expected in a cosmic religion for the future: it transcends a personal God, avoids dogma and theology; it covers both the natural and spiritual, and it is based on a religious sense aspiring from the experience of all things, natural and spiritual, as a meaningful unity."

-- Albert Einstein --

Albert Einstein: "Science without religion is
lame. . . . Religion without science is blind."

In the book "The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama," editor Arthur Zajonc makes the following comments on the ways in which the so-called "New Physics" has turned classical understandings of the cosmos and reality on their ears:

"During the three centuries that established classical physics and cosmology," Zajonc observes, "the mechanistic and materialistic character of physical theory came to dominate Western thinking even outside these areas. Increasingly, philosophy came under the powerful sway of science through such thinkers as Descartes, Kant and Locke. The life sciences, longing for comparable precision, sought out a similar path to development to that of physics. Genetics, evolution, and cellular biology displaced natural history and whole-organism biology. The mind itself, traditionally understood as the expression of the spirit, gradually became part of the mechanistic universe as well. By the dawn of the twentieth century, the physics of the seventeenth century had successfully conquered the adjacent areas of science and was already encroaching on that of the mind. A single mechanistic paradigm and its associated materialistic metaphysics came to dominate Western thinking."

However, he notes:

"With the opening of the twentieth century, the theories of quantum mechanics and relativity would make incomparable demands on our conception of the universe. We are still struggling to grasp their full implications. They challenge the simple mechanistic accounts of matter and the cosmos we inherited from earlier centuries, replacing them with accounts that shun such pictures. In addition, both quantum theory and relativity grant a new prominence to the observer. It is hard to overestimate the significance of these developments. The ramifications of twentieth-century discoveries for physics and cosmology have been enormous, changing our very notions of space and time, the ultimate nature of matter, and the evolution of the universe. They have also begun to affect philosophical discussions in significant ways."

For his part, the Dalai Lama notes that, "In Buddhism in general, and particularly in Mahayana Buddhism, the basic attitude is that you should remain skeptical at the beginning. This skeptical attitude automatically brings up questions. Questions bring clearer answers, or investigation. Therefore, Mahayana Buddhist thinking relies more on investigation rather than on faith. . . (An) attitude that is very, very helpful in communicating with scientists."

"There are two kinds of wrong views," the Dalai Lama notes. "One exaggerates what is actually there, superimposing onto a thing a property of existence or status that is not there. The other denies what is actually there. So both absolutism and nihilism are seen as wrong views. Thus, even in ethical discourse, a correct understanding of reality is very much emphasized. Therefore, scientific findings are very helpful to Buddhist thinking."

The three-part video discussion, below, (like the dialogue between scientists and the Dalai Lama in 'The New Physics and Cosmology') examines the areas where "the new physics" described by Zajonc seemingly converge with traditional Buddhist teachings about emptiness, Oneness and the nature of 'reality.'

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?"

Does Consciousness Create the Universe?

"All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind the existence of this force a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter."

-- Max Planck --

It is safe to say that the work of Max Plank inspired Einstein's vision of relativity. He may also be called the father of the quantum theory. Indeed, it was Planck who first coined and used the term 'quanta" to describe the smallest possible unit of energy.  His work at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries set the stage for the "new physics" which has contributed so significantly to a new scientific and sociological worldview. And his observation that "the matrix of all matter" is "mind" continues to present a challenge to physics, psychology and metaphysics as collectively we search for paradigms of new meaning to understand reality and our place in it.

The attached video, from which Planck's famous axiom is taken, explores the possibility (some would say "probability" or even "reality") that it is consciousness itself which gives birth to the universe as we know it . . . and it is the quality of consciousness that effects the quality of our reality and our world.