Modeling the Evolution of Consciousness: The Evolution of Consciousness, Part 11
Google Earth Fractal: Egypt
By observing his own children as they developed, the psychologist Jean Piaget discovered that a child matures cognitively in a series of distinct stages.[i] The psychologist Erik Erikson suggested that a person matures throughout her life in a series of psychosocial stages.[ii] And Lawrence Kohlberg and Carol Gilligan – also psychologists – found a similar unfolding for one’s moral development.[iii] Each stage, according to the professor of psychology Clare Graves, “is a unified system that encompasses the development of values, worldviews, self-sense, belief systems, neurological activation, and a person’s overall center of psychic gravity.”[iv] From infancy through old age, we each become less self-centered, more cognitively, emotionally, and morally sophisticated, less troubled by ambiguity, more modest, more “wise.”[v]
And with some variation and with perhaps less linearity—the idea goes—human culture has evolved along a similar trajectory. That is, Civilization has developed through a series of stages that are analogous in some very important respects to the bio-psycho-social stages through which a person matures.[vi] Indeed, as Graves suggested, the development of our individual stages tends to recapitulate the stages of human history.[vii] Infants and early forager societies, for example, both share a way of viewing the world that is magical and capricious. Later, young children and the inhabitants of feudal empires are easily led to believe in powerful gods (or God) from which all action manifest and which communicate and negotiate the terms of our very existence with us. As an adolescent, one may sense that the universe behaves in a more ordered, less personal, way. Not by whim, but by “laws” that are internally consistent and potentially apprehensible through both reason and observation. At the scale of a society, this attempt to shed dogmatism in favor of empirical knowledge took hold in the West during the 17th century Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. The Eastern philosophical traditions had reached similar conclusions millennia earlier, calling these impersonal laws of the universe variously dharma, dhamma, and the Tao. Later in life, an adult may come to understand the universe in an even more integrated and wondrous way, perceiving it as a complex, dynamic evolutionary process in which every event is related—however inexplicably—to every other. According to William Irwin Thompson, since the late 19th century, some of Civilization’s leading-edge denizens have begun shifting into this latest stage.[viii] For Civilization, as with the sage adult, this newest consciousness tends to emerge from an integration of all our “intelligences,” including the scientist, the artist, and the mystic.
Nataraja - Shiva dancing
Implicit in these models is that not everyone within a society perceives reality with the same general worldview. Rather, a map of the worldviews of a society would perhaps more resemble the shape of a bell curve, where most people fall within the society’s “center of psychic gravity.” Extend this metaphor of a normal distribution curve, drawing one after the next through history like the top halves of a sine curve, and you have historian Fernand Braudel’s long wave of history.[ix] Within each wave reside most of the “ordinary” people who “looked out at the world in the common mentality of their time.”[x] And, at any one moment, in either direction lie the other bell curves, smaller, populated with less people, and overlapping each other. Today, over half of humanity still resides in the worldview of children, a mythic stage where belief in right and wrong is rigidly held, and—to maintain law and order in an otherwise evil world—one pledges allegiance to state and to a God that reigns supreme.[xi] Progressively fewer people inhabit the worldviews in each developmental direction, backward and forward in time. There is another metaphor that perhaps better captures the dynamics of the process: that is, Civilization as an amoeba. Its body sits where it has been most nourished by reality. Its pseudopods represent other worldviews. The leading pseudopod reaches forward, and when it finds greater sustenance, the whole of Civilization morphs slowly, fluidly, into the pseudopod, inhabiting its new terrain.
The Great Wave of Kanagawa, by Kasutshika Hokusai
According this model, those people who have advanced farther and faster along the evolutionary path tend to be the most admired in history. They become Civilization’s heroes, the ones to whom we aspire to emulate: Siddhartha Gautama, Jesus Christ, Mirabai, Teresa of Avila, Confucius, Socrates, Joan of Arc, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela. Some societies, too, have sparkled particularly bright and serve as our guideposts—contemporary Ladakh, Kerala, and Vermont, the 18th century American colonies, Holland during its Nazi resistance, Catalonia Spain during the Spanish civil war, 3rd century BCE India during the Maurya dynasty, the Golden Age of Athens during the 5th century BCE, and the Bronze Age Minoan society. Each served as exemplars of human possibility, at least in comparison to the dominant worldviews in which they were situated.
In the mid-twentieth century, two figures—the Christian Jesuit and paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the Hindu mystic Sri Aurobindo—traced out the evolutionary end point of humanity within this evolutionary context. They took the notions of perfectibility through self-effort to their extremes. Both saw the evolution of consciousness as a progressive dynamical process that was the logical flowering of material evolution toward an ultimate wholeness with the universe. Teilhard “proposed that the increasing complexity and consciousness of humans is directly related to the evolution of the universe. This complexity-consciousness… is an emergent property of matter itself.”[xii] According to Tielhard, “The consciousness of each of us is evolution looking at itself and reflecting upon itself.”[xiii] Sri Aurobindo similarly envisioned that “It is indeed as a result of evolution that we arrive at the possibility of… transformation. As Nature has evolved beyond Matter and manifested Life, beyond Life and manifested Mind, so she must evolve beyond Mind and manifest a consciousness and power of our existence free from the imperfection and limitation of our mental existence.” [xiv] His central theme was the evolution of our ordinary human life into life divine.
On the one hand, these two mystics’ evolutionary models served to philosophically re-integrate the dualistic split of materialism and idealism. On the other, the models were logical expressions of a universal spiritual worldview called the Great Chain of Being.[xv] According to this view, held by just everybody since the beginning of Civilization except for the post-Enlightenment materialists, “reality is a rich tapestry of interwoven levels, reaching from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit.”[xvi] Each succeeding level “transcends and includes” the previous level and is perceived by a person to be more subtle in reality. Tielhard de Chardin and Sri Aurobindo simply placed the worldview within an evolutionary framework. They borrowed from Western science and then went beyond. Western science begins its model of reality at the Big Bang and then views increasingly complex phenomena as “emerging” from simpler ones. For example, the interplay of subatomic particles and the various fundamental forces (the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism) lead to the emergence of atoms, which then lead to the emergence of molecules, then crystals, living organisms, and consciousness. Whereas materialist science is presently at odds over how to even interpret consciousness, the two mystics saw ordinary human consciousness not as some inexplicable evolutionary end point but rather as an early stage in the long continuum of being.[xvii]
Accordingly, as this model goes, the development of a person and the whole of Civilization follow similar patterns of unfolding. As if this pattern were written into the rules of the universe—the Dharma, the Dhamma, the Tao. To use another metaphor: as in a rose, the pattern of its full flower are already enfolded in its bud. Or as the ethnobotanist/mystic Terence McKenna provocatively put it, “The universe is not being pushed from behind. The universe is being pulled from the future toward a goal that is as inevitable as a marble reaching the bottom of a bowl when you release it up near the rim.”[xviii] However, even the eternal optimist Teilhard did not see this process as inevitably leading to a higher human consciousness. Cosmic evolution will continue. But our perfection is not guaranteed. Our self-created extinction could arrest the process.[xix]
Table 1. To condense the enormous complexity of stages, variously called mentalities, worldviews, and “consciousness structures”[xx] into a visually comprehensible map, simple charts have been often created by many of the contributors. The names given to represent a worldview are meant to capture the essence of the way in which reality is perceived or experienced by the people of the time. Since Ken Wilber has expressly focused on comparing and synthesizing the works of others in the field, I am using his maps as an example of how the dominant societal worldviews have changed (and with his last two stages, perhaps will change) through time.[xxi]
ENDNOTES
[i] Dworetzsky, J.P. (1985) Introduction to Child Development, West Publishing Company, St. Paul, MN.. Ignored here is Sigmund Freud’s highly controversial hypothesis of psychosexual development. The ideas of Piaget, Erikson and Kolhberg have also faced great criticism.
[ii] Erikson, E.H. (1966) Eight Stages of Man, International Journal of Psychiatry, v. 2(3), pp. 281-300.
[iii] Kohlberg (1977), Gilligan (1993). Kohlberg, L., and Hersh, R.H. (1977) Moral Development: A Review of the Theory, Theory into Practice, v. 16, pp. 53-59. Gilligan, C. (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.
[iv] McIntosh, S. (2007:32) Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution. Paragon House, St. Paul, MN.
[v] Hall, S. (2010) Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
[vi] Gebser, J. (1953) The Ever-Present Origin (Translation by Noel Bardstad with Algis Mickunas). Ohio University Press, Athens, OH. Thompson, W.I. (1998) Coming Into Being: Artifacts and Texts in the Evolution of Consciousness, St. Martin’s Press, Griffin, New York.
[vii] McIntosh (2007:32).
[viii] Thompson (1998, 2009). Thompson, W.I. (2009) Self and Society: Studies in the Evolution of Culture, Second Enlarged Edition, Imprint Academic, Exeter, UK.
[ix] Braudel’s ideas of long or great waves of economic history are explored in Braudel (1984) and Fischer (1996). Braudel, F. (1984) The Perspective of the World, Volume III: Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Translated by Reynolds, S., Collins, London. Fischer, D.H. (1996) The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. Oxford University Press, New York.
[x] Thompson (2009:36).
[xi] Laszlo (2006), McIntosh (2007:44). Laszlo, E. (2006) The Chaos Point: The World at the Crossroads. Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc., Charlottesville, VA.
[xii] Grim, J., and Tucker, M.E. (2003) Introduction, pp. 1-12, in A. Fabel and D. St. John, Teilhard in the 21st Century: The Emerging Spirit of Earth, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY.
[xiii] de Chardin, P.T. (1955/1975:221) The Phenomenon of Man. Harper and Row Publishers, New York.
[xiv] Sri Aurobindo (1953:31-32)The Mind of Light, E.P. Dutton and Company, Inc., New York.
[xv] Wilber, K. (1998:6-7) The Marriage of Sense and Soul: Integrating Science and Religion, Random House, New York.
[xvi] Wilber (1998:6-7), italics his.
[xvii] For the materialists’ various arguments see for example Hofstadter and Dennett (1981), Dennet (1991), Chalmers (1996), Carter (2002), Richards (2002), Ramachandran (2011). What materialists accept in common is that the physical universe is primary and all other phenomena are the result. The whole of the universe can be adequately explained through an understanding of the interaction of matter and the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak nuclear force) in the spacetime field.
Hofstadter, D.R. and Dennet, D.C., Editors (1981) The Mind’s I: Fantasies and Reflections on Self and Soul, Bantam Books, Toronto. Dennet, D.C. (1991) Consciousness Explained, Little Brown and Company, Boston. Chalmers, D.J. (1996) The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory, Oxford Univ. Press, New York. Carter, R. (2002) Exploring Consciousness, University of California Press. Richards, J.W., Editor (2002) Are We Spiritual Machines? Kurzweil , R. vs. the Critics of Strong A.I. Discovery Institute Press, Seattle, WA. Ramachandran, V.S. (2011) The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human. W.W. Norton & Company, New York.
[xviii] McKenna, T. (1994, November) Approaching Timewave Zero, Magical Blend Magazine, Issue 44.
[xix] de Chardin (1955, 1964).
[xx] In a memoriam to Jean Gebser, Jean Keckeis defined “consciousness structures⁄as nothing other than the visibly emerging perception of reality throughout the various ages and civilizations.” Kekeis, J. in Gebser (1953:xx).
[xxi] Wilber (2000:215, 2007:21). Wilber, K. (2000:215) Integral Psychology: Consciousness, Spirit, Psychology, Therapy. Shambala, Boston. Wilber, K. (2007:21) Integral Spirituality: A Startling New Role for Religion in the Modern and Postmodern World. Integral Books, Boston.
