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EVOLVING CONSCIOUSNESS

By Bill Stephen

I have been applying the theory of evolution to literary accounts of religious and spiritual experience. Re-reading William Wordsworth's poem, "Ode on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" recently, I realised that although this poem is again reflecting upon the moral influence Nature exerted upon him as a child and indeed, by means of contemplation as an adult, in its concept of human destiny it is firmly rooted in Christian tradition. Wordsworth assumes that every new born child has a soul and has come straight from heaven, possessing spiritual knowledge which will gradually fade away as the child grows and which will linger in the adult mind only as a faint echo or dream to be sought after but never to be recaptured. At birth we emerge from a state of innocence and bliss which gradually lose their influence as we grow up until they become no more than a vague aspiration which some of us at least continue to cherish but never attain.

This, of course, we recognise as the Garden of Eden myth retold by the poet as personal experience; an account of the fall of Mankind from the state of innocence to the state of sin that is the inevitable result of the pursuit of knowledge, since the wish for knowledge undermines faith and usurps autocratic authority.

Wordsworth is describing a perfectly natural process which he transforms by the power of the imagination into a religious experience, another natural process in which we may all participate, to a certain degree, but more of that later. We all know that as children the world was a magical place. We were seeing, hearing, smelling, touching so many things for the first time. Our senses were brand new, alert, sharp, keen, transmitting a stream of intense experiences to our brain which transmuted them into feelings of awe, wonder and sheer delight. There was also the excitement of self-discovery: in reacting to our environment we became aware of our own consciousness and imagination. I still remember as a five year old, seeing a clump of primroses for the first time. The clear yellow flowers, laughing, waving from a corona of dark green, crumpled leaves, as thick as felt, entranced me. Nature seemed to be such a joyful, playful creature that was scattering her delights of colour, scent, shape and texture around like sweeties at a picnic. I looked around at the dark, swaying trees, the blue sky, the grass sparkling with daisies and was overwhelmed by the wonder of it all and its mysterious existence. It all seemed to mean something but what it was and who had put it there I could not fathom. I was glad, however, that I seemed to be a part of it. I am certain that the reason why so many of us seek out remote and empty places or travel to the ends of the earth in pursuit of novelty, is to feel again that childish thrill of encountering the new, the strange and the unknown and relishing its mysteriousness. So often, it is that we discover so much of our selves in contemplating the mysterious.

As we mature, we learn, and what was once new becomes familiar and common-place. This too is a natural process. We cannot resist it. How perverse then of Wordsworth to regard it as a degenerative process, when it is the opposite. Childhood is precious, for many a magical stage in life, precisely because it is a time of discovery, a time of increasing awareness, when we evolve from a spontaneous response to experience to an attempted understanding of that experience.

This mental, moral, spiritual evolution of the individual is our human nature. Our community life-style, also a feature of our nature, requires us to subordinate certain of our urges to promote social harmony, but there seems to be no justification for regarding our nature as base, degenerate or sinful, because we develop from the innocence of childhood to the sophistication of adulthood and perhaps lose that sense 0 wonder on the way. W ordsworth seems to have been unfamiliar with the scientific concept of evolution. He died several years before Charles Darwin finally published his work and so I suppose it is unjust to censure him for setting his experience within the Christian doctrine of four original sin, particularly as this view of human nature had dominated traditional thinking for hundreds of years.

It is an interesting, nevertheless, to speculate what our culture might have been had an evolutionary interpretation of the Bible been available in the past. It might have been possible to read the Bible as an account of developing human consciousness. The exit from the Garden of Eden might have been more positively interpreted as an account of emerging human consciousness rather than human disobedience; the Cain and Abel myth as a growing awareness that divine worship may take many forms, each one as valid as the other; Noah's Flood as an acknowledgement that natural disasters are a function of Nature and not the retribution of a wrathful God; that Abraham's attempted sacrifice of his only son, Isaac, is the realisation that self-sacrifice or sacrifice of a loved one to demonstrate one's loyalty to God, is an obsessive rather than a spiritual act; that Job's horrendous history shows the impossibility of ever comprehending the mind or intentions of an omnipotent and eternal being; the indefinable cannot be explained or explained away; that the New Testament concludes that love is the ultimate destination of human consciousness. The Bible is an account of a wide variety of human experiences, racial, communal; personal, emotional, spiritual, moral and historical interpreted as a relationship between a Divine Creator and humankind. Consciousness of the events of daily living, the weather, the fertility of soil, animals and people, the availability of food and water, vulnerability to disease, accidents, enemies and natural disasters, becomes transmuted in the mind, by the action of the imagination, fear, sense of wonder, sense of powerlessness, desire for meaning and understanding, into a religion, and in the case of the ancient Hebrews a religion dominated by a single creator God, who in time became also the Christian God.

Our consciousness has so evolved that we have a concept of the microscopically tiny and the infinitely large; we can imagine eternity and comprehend the instantaneous; we can cope with a factual and material world and simultaneously exist in a realm of imagination, suppositions, concepts and dreams. We also realise that there is a level of existence that we cannot access, a world beyond the reach of our senses and the comprehension of our mind. Evolution's having equipped us with this remarkable faculty of consciousness, it seems perverse of us to limit our response to existence by confining ourselves to a set of dogmatic precepts distilled from ancient scripture.

Increasingly I find myself thinking that spirituality and consciousness are perhaps the same thing, where consciousness includes empathy and imagination. How we react to whatever is around us, people, nature, inanimate things, events etc. depends upon our immediate knowledge of these things but also more importantly of our much deeper understanding of ourselves and of how the world is and of how we are connected to it. That is we try to take a cosmic view. The deeper our understanding of any person or situation, the more balanced our response. If we push understanding of reality to the limit we arrive at love.

Taking the cosmic view, trying to see the overall picture, is an essential aspect of our consciousness. We lift an experience out of the here and five now into a creative realm of the mind, the imagination, where we are less dominated by immediate personal concerns or habit or the expectations of others and allow ourselves to test our response against an infinite background. Ralph Waldo Emerson, I think, might recognise this process as verging upon his notion of transcendentalism, that is raising experience beyond the ordinary to a cosmic level.

He writes this in his essay 'Nature', "Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky...my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I see nothing; I see all: the currents of Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God." In other words he cannot distinguish himself from the rest of creation. He is at one with the while cosmos.

This sense of wholeness, of oneness, of being in harmony with and absorbed into everything else, we might call mysticism, but what is mysticism if not consciousness in its most perceptive form. Although the experience raises him above purely personal concerns, above egotism, he is still aware that the experience is his. There is a strange contradiction here in that the experience is both objective, he has become merged into the totality of all creation, and subjective, his individuality has survived for him to describe the event. He is still the same physical human being, who is having a remarkable spiritual experience. This objective/subjective contradiction recalls Heisenberg's theory of uncertainty and its corollary that there is no such thing as an objective view of reality, as the very process of observation alters it.

This paradox, this state of having a unique identity while being totally absorbed in the wholeness of creation, of being a discrete, recognisable droplet in a whole ocean, is not a unique experience. Here again is Emerson, dashing off in his Diary on 11th. April 1834, an account of another occasion when he felt at one with the cosmos. "I opened my eyes and let what would pass through them into the soul. 1 heeded no more what minute or hour our Massachusetts' clocks might indicate. 1 saw only the noble earth on which 1 was born, with the great star which warms and enlightens it. 1 saw the clouds .... It was Day, that was all Heaven said. The pines glittered with their innumerable needles in the light and seemed to challenge me to read their riddle. The drab oak leaves of the last year turned their little somersaults and lay still again. And the wind bustled high in the forest top."

Once again he remains aware of being an individual, but all the stifling layers of self-hood have been shed, self-centredness, anxiety, distrust, disappointment, frustration, discontent, resentment, all the feelings that prevent our whole-hearted engagement with life, that get between us and love. All the trappings of self do m drop away and in that moment of release, he is aware of another self, his real self, that spontaneously reaches out and blends with the whole of creation in a loving union.

Evolution has equipped all creatures with a degree of awareness so that they may survive within their own environment; only human beings, however, as far as we know, have developed a theory of mind and this ability to hold a comprehensive view of the universe that includes the physical, the mental and the spiritual, the actual and the hypothetical, the finite and the infinite, the unknowable and indifinable, the changeful and the eternal. Presumably such a facility helps us to survive. It certainly allows us to predict the consequences of our actions which may help us save the planet in the very near future. It enables us to value creatures and things other than ourselves, instilling in us a moral sense. It raises our aspirations above that of the merely materialistic, in that it allows us to be the consciousness of the universe, since to our knowledge, we are the only species capable of appreciating its vastness and complexity.

We live in a materialistic world which paradoxically yearns for the spiritual nourishment which it has rejected. Traditional religions with their prescriptive, authoritarian approach have for centuries denied us the freedom to explore and enjoy the vast richness of our consciousness and our barren materialistic world has emerged as a result, as millions of us have turned our backs upon religion and spiritual exercise as an unfulfilling experience.

Somehow, as a society, we must recover the joy of consciousness, raise our horizons beyond the mundane, the familiar, the commonplace and focus upon the endless vistas that are always open and opening in the cosmos of our own mind. This is how we access the divinity of the universe. Of all the benefactions bequeathed upon us by evolution, Consciousness is the greatest. Let us exploit it to the full.

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