ecospirit

Schellenberg argures that, compared to other hominins, we are still young, and both the seemingly advanced state of scientific progress and our religious profundity are over-rated. He expects our (or other species with a similarly reflective intelligence) future development to lead to “improvements in our spiritual genetic code.” He cites evolutionary biologists who attest that our brains are three times the size and complexity of Lucy, the australopithecus (ca. 3.5 million years BP), who also say that growth of the same magnitude may await us. Of course there is an assumption here that cognitive development is a precondition for spiritual development. Responses to my last post, both at this site and privately, question this.

Here is my take on it. Yes, there is a powerful intuitive strain, as well as a high capacity for emotional intelligence, in many mammals. And, since we will shortly be discussing social intelligence, many social species seem to be far more advanced than we. But I am not yet convinced that the kind of reflection which both Schellenberg and Berry see as key to deeper, conscious spiritual development can be achieved without an extremely high level of cognitive development. Since we cannot communicate through language, we don't really know if this is the case for dolphins, whales, and elephants. Nor can we assume that they do have reflective intelligence, a reflectivity that in our species is capable of going to the very source of the I-thought, as is richly evidenced in Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism.

GROUP RELIGION vs PERSONAL TRANSFORMATION

With respect to this core capacity for reflectivity, individual humans have clearly followed it to attain a high degree of spiritual development, as with founder-models of world religions such as Jesus and Gautama the Buddha. But instances of personal transformation are insufficient when social behavior reputedly based in religious belief remains as sectarian as ever. This continuing juvenile group behavior is clearly one of the main reasons militant atheists attack organized religion, and current headlines underline this doubt.

For my mentor Joanna Macy, developing the capacity for group transformation is critical if we are going to survive the evolutionary bottleneck we face in the immediate future. “Self-reflexive consciousness... does not characterize the next holonic level, the level of social systems. Though an 'esprit de corps' can be sensed in organizations with strong allegiances, it is too diffuse to register and respond to all the feedback necessary for it survival. The locus of decision-making remains with the individual, susceptible to all the vagaries of what that individual considers to be of self-interest...” She goes on to pose the question of whether the present crisis might “engender a collective level of self-interest in choice-making – in other words, self-reflexivity on the next holonic level.” A genuine evolutionary shift would move beyond the kind of group unconscious possession which remains a recent memory in the case of fascism. As she says, “a monolith of uniformity has no internal intelligence. The holonic shift in consciousness would not sacrifice, but instead require, the uniqueness of each part and its point of view. It would begin, almost imperceptibly, with a sense of common fate, and a shared interest to meet it together” Coming Back to Life, 43-44.

Thomas Berry goes so far as to say a “re-invention of the human at the species level” (The Great Work) is necessary for our survival . It would be a great blessing if this were to occur in the few remaining years of the “last decade,” before the window closes, but I continue to be skeptical about “conscious evolution,” which seems to be simply a projection beyond individual instances of transformation . For those of us who place more credence in biological evolution along demonstrated lines, Schellenberg's promise of a billion years of evolutionary process to achieve reinvention is comforting...

A more mature religious stance, one which would invite this holonic shift, would entail an openness to and tolerance of others' experiences of the ultimate. In the realm of things unseen, paranormal, and metaphysical, truth claims are extremely difficult to verify. The more detailed a belief is, the harder it is to convince others with contrary specific beliefs of common ground. Faith, on the other hand, keeps us open to a reality beyond the realm of our limited cognitive and emotive abilities. His argument about belief is a rational restatement of what the Hindu Advaitists have already argued more eloquently. Krishna Prem pointed out in his invaluable “Initiation into Yoga” that every belief, when carefully examined, is a floating kite tethered by a string which returns to a corresponding doubt. More fundamentally, my master Ramana Maharshi punctures the fundamental belief shared by almost all religions that reality consists of god, world, and self, saying that all are illusory, for the Self that projects this habitual trinity is the only abiding reality.

Schellenberg does not attempt an exhaustive review of the history of religious practices, content with the generalization that ongoing religious squabbles and wars prove its immaturity. When he looks out at the social scape of current practice, he sees the same dreary picture that the atheist critics do, without giving up on religious possibility. But there are small religious communities that have blazed a different path. One that I know intimately is Quakerism, the Religious Society of Friends. Though George Fox's original vision was through Jesus as the historical Christ, his imaginative genius led him directly to the Light as a universal indwelling spirit in all humankind. So, though many Quakers remain Christian or recognize their Christian origins, we have no creed, and do not erect barriers to other sects due to purported beliefs. “There is that of God in every man” (Fox) is what we try to recognize, no matter what the other may call that. Quakerism is the western expression of the Upanisadic sage's axiom, “There is one Being, but wise men call it by different names.”

For me, Quaker practice at its best exemplifies the beliefless or “imaginative” faith that Schellenberg sees as a fundamental requirement for an evolutionary religion. Quakers practice a corporate mysticism where truth experienced as revelatory is tested by the group, especially the elders (“seasoned Friends”), who bring a loving and open skepticism to specific belief claims that emanate from personal experience. The earliest Quakers called themselves Friends of the Truth, and one of their immediate roots was in the Diggers, whose leader Gerrard Winstanley equated Christ and Reason. A religion that is both experiential and experimental, it is not tied to biblical truth, but rather to that Spirit by which [the scriptures] were written (Fox, Journal, 70 in Armistead ed). “The truth is more holy than the book to me,” Fox responded when asked to swear on the Bible. Furthermore, Quakers have a strong commitment to “continuing revelation,” for the divine is active at all times, throughout history, if we will only listen. What could be a better context for practicing evolutionary religion?

The number of American Quakers is now half what it was in the 1970's, when I first encountered them. They do not have significant numbers anywhere except in Kenya, where they were evangelized by a branch of Quakerism closer to mainstream Protestantism. But the story of social evolution is not necessarily of continuous growth. I hope that, going forward, Quakers do a better job of sharing what they have to offer, especially with the significant number of youth who are “spiritual but not religious.” We do not know what practices might survive the coming evolutionary bottleneck for complex life on Earth. But I pray that Quakerism, particularly that which reflects most closely its first generation (conservative Quakers, who are in even greater decline), is one of them. Even if we experience extinction on the scale of the Permian catastrophe 250 million years ago, when 95% of species perished, the possibility remains for four recoveries from such an event over a billion-year evolutionary future. And we will need the most effective models of religious tolerance and openness to continuing revelation (with means of testing them) available for any such unimaginatively long recovery. Hopefully, after the current sixth extinction, the Earth will not witness another mass extinction event induced by the behavior of one errant tenant species.

The focus of my faith, and the basis of my hope, has been for many years one of trusting the indwelling Spirit, the First Mover, the Creator who is wellspring of the material universe, source of our breath and soul. I wrote an essay at the request of the National Council of Churches about this, first calling it ecological faith, then moving to the more inclusive term cosmogenetic faith. Ecological faith takes me beyond faith in our brave, flawed species to a trust in the system, trust in Gaia as one self-regulating being, its intelligence sustaining the whole by being distributed throughout it. Cosmogenetic faith moves beyond planetary ecological processes to the radical Good News that the Creator creates on an infinite scale, ecosystem after ecosystem, universe after universe.

Despite this eco-theological buttress, I have been obsessed these last several years with near-term human extinction. As I have struggled with this frighteningly probable event, I have come to realize what the crux of it for me is. It is not just the unimaginable suffering of billions (human and non-human). It is not just the specific imagining of the untimely demise of my grandchildren. Nor is it the loss of so much that I hold dear in the Cenozoic Era and Holocene Epoch, the context of our blessed opportunity to work and dance on the material plane. What it really comes down to is the consequences this would have for one of Thomas Berry's central realizations, that the universe is aware of itself through us, homo sapiens. In The Universe Story, he names this reflective awareness a ”new power, a power of consciousness whereby Earth, and the universe as a whole, turned back and reflected on itself.” (143) So my question, what happens to this essential self-awareness, radical creative generativity being conscious of itself as world-making, if we go extinct?

Even as I have pondered and written about this these last eight years, astronomers have discovered a vastly-increasing number of exoplanets that may harbor intelligent life, and of course some are open to the possibility of parallel worlds. A few, those with a more Eastern sensibility, even entertain the notion of serial universes, as the Hindus believe. But this particular place, the Garden of Yahweh, is my home, and the rest is a thoroughgoing mixture of conjecture and faith. Human extinction matters to me perhaps most importantly because I was raised with the biblical story of Yahweh having a special, chosen relationship with us. And I am not aware of any other species for which this is an intimate, felt relationship. You could call this a failure of imagination, but it is related to a trait that I value, namely that I am more interested in experience of the divine mystery than in any belief about it.

Evolutionary Religion comes back to the spiritually modest, materially expansive proposition that though development of a mature religious perspective on this Earth is still quite rudimentary, “we” still have a very long time in which to make more progress, even if we destroy much of the gift we were given in terms of the 63 million year bloom of the Cenozoic. That destruction would involve ecological and civilizational collapse, including an epochal number of extinctions, perhaps including our own. It is quite possible that positive feedback cycles will become so severe that the earth becomes uninhabitable for higher life, in which case Schellenberg's thesis would be moot. But if the conditions for higher life remain after the ongoing series of shocks we have already started have reached equilibrium, then “we” may survive the bottleneck industrial humans have created. The referent for this “we” is intelligent life on this planet with a thirst for ultimate meaning, necessitating a deep religious faith. Homo sapiens can suicide, yet Berry's intuitive proposition about the self-reflective quality of the universe can survive! This is crucial to the possibility of meaning in this universe, which Schellenberg sees, without reference to Berry, as crucial, even as a religious skeptic. And it cognitively restores the grounds for my faith and hope.

DEEP TIME. This is key to Schellenberg's argument, and something with which I have a modicum of familiarity. Joanna Macy introduced me to the concept through some exercises in my training with her in California in 2000. We did a “Dance of the Ancestors” in which we moved through evolutionary history, experiencing our hominin forebears, as well as our ancient Old World ones. We experienced guided meditations of cosmic history since the Big Bang, and a couple in which we imagined future beings, presumably human, who thanked us for making it through the evolutionary bottleneck caused by climate change and habitat loss. But explorations of future time remained in the relatively near future, as Joanna had us imagine beings a hundred or perhaps a few hundred years in the future. When I have asked groups to choose future moments in some of my workshops, they have ventured as far as 10,000 years. (This is the figure Gary Snyder says is required for our maturation as a species.) But Schellenberg has his sights on really deep time, which he says we have missed in our backward-looking habits.

According to Schellenberg, the Darwinian revolution is only half finished, and our religious quest barely begun. Geology and Darwinian evolution, with their focus on the past, have achieved the initial half of the needed revolution. They discovered deep time, but stopped in the present. He argues that it extends as well into the evolutionary future, “Darwin's Door,” and evolutionary religion banks on that time for developmental advances in our maturity as a species, towards which religion is essential. This involves cultural evolution as well as biological. Intelligent life has the capacity to extend into what is rather unfathomable, a billion years of evolution of life on this planet (perhaps up to 2.4 billion years, the latter figure based on potential variations in atmospheric pressure as the sun gets hotter and hotter in its progression towards star death in another 4 billion years). Clearly a careful and imaginative teacher, he outlines exercises he uses with students for them to start to imagine, to move from vague cognition to gut recognition, the vast time scale involved here.

For myself, having been opened to a sense of deep time through exercises such as plotting on the floor the spiraling history of this universe since the supposed Big Bang, I had a second moment of recognition. If you assume the I behind the we witnessing evolving space-time, that is, the Creator within us, and sense that I in a continuing series of present moments, you begin to feel the vastness of possibility. And i, as the little perplexed, neurotic thinker who is worried about near-term extinction, find my fear for the near term (tremendously multiplied by reading Guy McPherson, Carolyn Baker and their ilk) eroding so fast that joy and hope return. When you look at it, virtually nobody in the current climate debate tends to think beyond 2050 or “a hundred years from now,” which has crept forward 12-15 years since climate scientists first ventured to project present trends, with respect to human presence in the earth's evolutionary history. We are collectively so enormously frightened of the near future, we cannot imagine anything beyond it, except the return of pre-conscious geological time. Replace this by a vigorously imagined (no daydreams here!) billion years of persistence of that I-thought, and we are in different territory indeed.

Up next: A "beliefless faith” is the necessary basis for a truly evolutionary religion on this planet.