The ONE and the ALL: An Evolutionary Approach to God, Self and Transcendence

By Bernard Bollen

His Holiness the Dalai Lama states, “We need a worldview grounded in science that does not deny the richness of human nature and the validity of modes of knowing other than the scientific”. This book directly addresses the Dalai Lama’s invitation. The story of humankind’s journey on this planet, starting some 200,000 years ago with the first hunter gatherer tribes in the plains of Africa must be one of the most compelling stories that can be told. This story tells us of our place on this planet. Since the publication of Charles Darwin’s book, ‘Origin of Species’, we now have a scientific/evolutionary story of humankind’s origins. Religions throughout history have also offered a story about our place in the universe, often based upon notions of a God, the creator of the universe. This God is often conceived as some sort of supernatural power ‘out there’ somewhere that imposes a moral order on the folk. However this view of God is simply untenable within the scientific/evolutionary worldview. According to the perennial philosophy, each world religion, regardless of its cultural or historical context, is a different expression of a fundamental truth. This fundamental truth can be summed up in the ancient Vedantic sentence ‘Tat Tvam Asi’, (or Thou Art That). The ONE and the ALL explores deeply what ‘Thou Art That’ may mean from a scientific/evolutionary perspective. It does this following the evolution of human consciousness from primitive organisms to our primate ancestors through to modern humans today. Many differing disciplines are traversed in The One and the ALL. These disciplines include the Philosophy of Science, Psychology, Linguistics, Evolutionary theory, Anthropology, History of Religion, Philosophy of Mind, Sociology, The Nature of Perception and Consciousness as well as Ethics and Morality. I invite you to share in this wonderful story about the ascent of humankind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bernard Bollen
• Release date: Dec 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301963478

Book preview

The ONE and the ALL

An Evolutionary Approach to

God, Self and Transcendence

Bernard Bollen, PhD

Copyright © 2012 by Bernard Bollen

Smashwords Edition

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Cover image by http://palnk.deviantart.com/

Acknowledgements

Some people mattered in the production of this book. Ross Bromley, a tireless atheist and rationalist made a number of surprisingly helpful comments on two earlier chapters. Philosopher Dr Robert Miller also made a number of valuable comments on the introductory chapter. Special mention must be made of philosopher Dr Geoffrey Marnell. Not only did he do an excellent job on copy editing the book, he took on the role of a hostile devil’s advocate of the work. Dr Marnell made well over 400 comments on the text, sometimes highly detailed, sometimes pedantic, sometimes humorous, always highly intelligent. Naturally, all errors, omissions and views remain the sole responsibility of the author.

Contents

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1: EVOLUTION AND EMERGENCE

CHAPTER 2: THE ASCENT OF CONSCIOUSNESS

CHAPTER 3: CONSCIOUSNESS IN HUMANS

CHAPTER 4: THE I-SELF

CHAPTER 5: THE SOCIAL-SELF

CHAPTER 6: GOD, RELIGION AND RATIONALITY

CHAPTER 7: TRANSCENDENCE

BIBLOGRAPHY

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

From a televised speech delivered by US President Jimmy Carter on July 15 1979.

Somehow, these words from Jimmy Carter resonate. They speak to a number of themes: lack of meaning, loss of community, personal identity based on consumerism, and life without confidence and purpose. It is an observation about a spiritual malaise widespread in contemporary Western society. No doubt for those of faith, the malaise could be remedied with a return to the Bible, Koran or some other type of spiritual practice. Yet in our time, many in Western societies do not have a faith, so there is no primal ground or centre for them to return to. The moral ground for many is based on an acceptance of atheism and humanism. Both those with, and those without, a faith may warm to an idea of society found many decades ago, where life was simpler, kinder and more gentle. But we cannot return to the past. Nor can we simply take on a faith, for faith as it is understood takes us.

This work is about rediscovering our ground or centre. It is not about taking a ‘leap of faith’ nor is it about getting to know a God that is ‘out there’ who looks down on his creation. It is something very different. It is about discovering what is true and of value in our many spiritual and religious traditions without adopting the historical baggage of those traditions. On this matter, this book takes an evolutionary perspective. Contemporary Darwinians may well be comfortable with the investigation outlined in what follows. And so may those of a faith. If what is proposed here is a religion of sorts, then it is a religion founded on scientific and evolutionary grounds. And it is most certainly not new. It is simply the perennial philosophy that goes back thousands of years reinterpreted for contemporary times.

For Aldous Huxley (1944), the perennial philosophy is:

… the metaphysic that recognizes a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with, divine Reality; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being; the thing is immemorial and universal. Rudiments of the perennial philosophy may be found among the traditional lore of primitive peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions.

At first sight it seems a difficult, if not an impossible, task to base notions of ‘divine Reality’ or ‘knowledge of the immanent and transcendent Ground of all being’ on a scientific–evolutionary perspective. Science and the perennial philosophy just don’t seem to fit on the same page. Neither does science and the notion God seem to fit on the same page. But they do. It’s all about how we conceive of God. Simply looking around us can tell us something crucial about the world we live in. And that is that we live in a complex, dynamically interrelated and interdependent eco-system with many and varied life-forms. Even if we reject traditional notions of what God may be, we are still left with the question of how the incredible variety, inter-relatedness and beauty of the world came to be.

If we accept evolutionary theory then we must accept that there is intelligence immanent in the unfolding of the universe. We do not need to believe in a creative, all-powerful God ‘out there’ to accept that there is a creative intelligence in the universe. Nor do we need to commit ourselves to a belief in a grand overarching purpose in the universe. To accept that there is intelligence immanent in the universe is, as it were, a given, something that can be concluded by simply looking around ourselves. We can view God as that creative intelligence, an intelligence that has an evolutionary basis and driven by some basic principles such as natural selection. To say, then, that each one of us is an expression of God’s work is to say trivially that we are but an expression of the unfolding of the universe. This is the perennial philosophy as given in the ancient Sanskrit texts: tat tvam asi or ‘Thou art that’.

But the perennial philosophy is more than simply a statement delivered on some intellectual level about our place in the universe. The perennial philosophy asserts that on another level—a non-conceptual level—we can directly experience ourselves as being a part of God’s expression, the ground of being. At this point, we are unified with the world. To directly experience ourselves as a part of God’s expression requires a shift from our ordinary waking consciousness to an immediate, direct, non-conceptual experience of the world. For thousands of years mystics from all parts of the world have spoken of this state of consciousness. The key to understanding the perennial philosophy in contemporary scientific–evolutionary terms is to understand the nature of human consciousness.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama states:

We need a worldview grounded in science that does not deny the richness of human nature and the validity of modes of knowing other than the scientific.¹

This book attempts to address the Dalai Lama’s invitation. Many paths are traversed in this endeavor. In chapter one, evolutionary theory is considered and embraced, both as it was originally understood by Charles Darwin and also by later thinkers and researchers. The scientific/evolutionary story of the universe posits that a singularity (the Big Bang or the ONE), which occurred some 13.7 billion years ago gave birth to the universe. The universe unfolded through scientific/evolutionary principles into three distinct spheres, the physiosphere, the biosphere and the ideosphere. The three spheres constitute the ALL, the totality of manifestations of the ONE. The theory of evolution is a theory about change in the biosphere. It asserts that life-forms change and adapt to their environment incrementally. The key question of interest is what are the mechanisms involved in change and adaption. Darwin’s principle of natural selection remains a key principle in explaining change in the natural world. But it isn’t the only principle. Over the past 100 or so years a number of researchers have explored reasons for the emergence of new and novel phenomena in the biosphere, phenomena such as human consciousness. The principle of natural selection alone cannot explain human consciousness, but additional principles—such as downward causation in complex dynamical systems—can provide a useful, additional framework.

A central theme of this work is the question of what consciousness is. This question will be evaluated and re-evaluated a number of times. Human consciousness has an evolutionary history that cannot be separated from the consciousness of those life-forms that preceded humans, right down to single-celled organisms. In the second chapter the evolution of consciousness through the many life-forms found on this planet is considered. All life-forms have developed capacities and forms of perception that are completely meshed with the requirements of the surrounding environment. Consciousness is immanent in the ongoing relation between a life-form and its environment, rather than being solely related to what is happening inside of the head of that life-form. Higher life-forms, such as mammals, have a far more flexible and complex relation with their environment. They have highly developed brains that control and co-ordinate perceptual, motor and body-regulatory functions. These three functions are closely integrated. Many mammals have a rudimentary capacity for social intelligence, but it is in the world of primates that social intelligence is most highly developed. Social intelligence is a new form of consciousness requiring not only the capacity to be sensitive to the behavior of others, but also the capacity for intra-species communication. The social intelligence found in non-human primates is the evolutionary springboard for the evolution of human consciousness.

Human consciousness is unlike that of any other life-form on this planet. The key difference is the unique human capacity for symbolic communication through language. Language is far more than a set of words that describe the world, for language also constructs much the world for us. It was the pioneering Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky who initially explained the process by which much of what we regard as individual psychological attributes—thinking, emotions, reasoning, memory and our personality—are by-products of the norms, values and linguistic distinctions available to all ordinary language users. On this view, a person is both a biological being and a social construction. We simply cannot separate who we are from our surrounding socio-cultural environment. Nor can we ignore our evolutionary history. The discussion in chapter four ends with the proposal that human consciousness comes in two forms. The first form consists of the direct and immediate forms of perception and motor responses found in all mammals, that is, skilful, adapted, worldly know-how. The second form of consciousness is inherited from our socio-cultural environment. It is an indirect and symbolic representation of the world. These symbols (language) are not individual representations, but are historically bequeathed socio-cultural symbols handed down by many generations of language users.

Given our biological history and our molding by society and culture, the question arises as to where the individual person is. Chapters four and five consider what an individual is, that is, what are the foundations of our sense-of-self, of our uniqueness and individuality. For we all have a very deep, gut-level belief that we are different and unique individuals. Humans have two senses-of-self, both related to the two forms of consciousness that humans possess. We have two selves, the first being that part of us which we believe to be the knower, witness or experiencer of the world. This self, which will be referred to as the I-self, is beyond any social classification (such as a person’s age, gender, appearance, personality or social status). Nor is the I-self a thought or an emotion, for the I-self is aware of thoughts and emotions. The I-self persists over time. It is our centre. And as it will be seen, the I-self is a fiction, an illusion formed by our linguistic practices. Philosopher, physiologist and psychologist William James (1842–1910), and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) will be close companions in these discussions.

In 1904, James published A World of Pure Experience, an academic paper which was both radical and largely ignored in the West throughout the 20th century. In it he explores those experiences which are pre-conceptual, that is, those experiences which are an immediate, direct coupling of the world and an individual. He calls this pure experience. In pure experience there is no symbolic thought, no sense of ‘I’, no subject and object, no doer and what is done, no experiencer and that which is experienced: just pure experience. Japanese philosopher Nishida Kitarō (1870–1945) immediately related the notion of pure experience with Zen Buddhist thought and practice. He took the notion of pure experience—or acting-intuition, as he refined the concept—far further into the realm of religious, aesthetic and moral experience. Nishida saw acting-intuition as a person’s fundamental relationship with the world. In acting-intuition, self and world are at one. What we believe to be our centre, our I-self, is in fact the world. Our true self is the world.

The I-self (a noun) is a fiction. We have no centre that experiences the world. But we do own experience when we engage in I-selfing (a verb). This process constructs a second self, our persona, or what will be referred to as our social-self. The construction of a social-self is the focus of chapter five. The social-self is a story about ourselves. It is a narrative constructed from many me-stories. The me-stories we have about ourselves work at many levels: our bodies, our personality, our upbringing, our work, our goals and aspirations, our successes and failures, and our immediate social life with family, friends, work mates and significant others. There are also big stories that define the social-self, stories of our life’s trajectory, stories of ideologies that we have adopted or stories of our religious faith that inform us of our place in the world. The me-stories of our lives are grounded in biographical facts but are not necessarily an objective retelling of our past. We construct and reconstruct the me-stories of our lives as we move through life’s trajectory. These stories are not a lie, nor are they an illusion. But neither are they the truth in any absolute sense. Me-stories give meaning to our lives. Without a set of me-stories our life would amount to a series of events without a theme, meaning or purpose. This leads to a discussion of me-stories in the modern and post-modern era where the social-self is seen to be a personal project. It is a personal project that is ongoing. In the post-modern era the social-self is constructed and re-constructed throughout our lives. There is no real ground or centre in the post-modern social-self, for ultimately the social-self is nothing but a changing narrative of who we are.

The concept of God is one of the big narratives that constructed the social-self of individuals in earlier times. The concept of God told humankind of its place in the universe and what it was to be good and moral. Chapter six takes a differing view and considers the evolution of the concept of God, beginning with the beliefs of early hunter-gather communities through to those of the three major Abrahamic faiths: modern Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Before the last ice age some ten thousand years ago, early hunter-gather communities saw the world as inhabited by spirits: spirits in the sea, mountains, clouds and lagoons. Animals and other humans could be inhabited by spirits with human-like personalities and could be kind or vengeful. During the Neolithic era, after the last ice age, there emerged throughout Europe and Asia large farming communities who worshipped many gods, but in particular, the Great Earth Goddess. The Great Earth Goddess was the source of life itself, and appeasing her would bring bountiful harvests. As farming communities grew into large and complex city–states, some gods became special. They were more powerful than all of the other gods. In Mesopotamia, Egypt and Greece large temples were built to appease the important gods. Polytheism eventually gave way to monotheism, with the Israelites coming to see their God, Yahweh as the only god, the source of all creation.

A turning point in the concept of God came about around 500 BCE when a number of Greek philosophers—Plato, Socrates and Aristotle among them—questioned the authority of the gods. Rather than assign responsibility for the changing world to humanlike gods with supernatural powers, the Greek philosophers asked if the world unfolded according to universal principles. They saw the world’s unfolding as based on idealized templates of reality called forms. There were forms for all life-forms as well as forms for goodness, justice and other virtues. All forms emanated from the highest of all forms, the form of the Good or the ONE. Later philosophers spoke of Logos or the Word as a set of God-given principles according to which the world unfolded—not quite the modern scientific paradigm but nonetheless close to a modern scientific view that the world unfolds according to laws of nature which emanated from a singularity.

Although the three major Abrahamic faiths were all deeply influenced by ancient Greek philosophy, and were interpreted in the light of ancient Greek philosophy, they nonetheless retained a belief in one all-powerful God ‘out there’. For the Greeks, what was good was to understand oneself through rationality and reason. For the three major Abrahamic faiths, what was good was to surrender to God, to live according to God’s will and purpose. In our time where the scientific-evolutionary perspective is near universally accepted in advanced western societies, it must be questioned if it is useful to speak at all of the notion of God. For if the notion of God is to be widely accepted in contemporary times then we must abandon many past conceptions of God. The notion of God must be consistent with, if not implied by the scientific-evolutionary worldview. To do this we must abandon the notion that God is ‘out there’, has humanlike qualities and intervenes directly in human affairs. However one can talk from a scientific-evolutionary perspective about a God that is immanent in nature itself. If this is a useful re-conception of God is another matter. In chapter seven the case is made that God can be thought of as the ONE, that singularity that underpins all manifest existence. If God is to be thought of in this way then questions of human purpose and morality must be considered from an entirely different perspective, that being an evolutionary perspective.

Independently of the Greek rationalist traditions and the Abrahamic faiths, the perennial philosophy found direct expression in the Vedic texts of the Hindus in northern India over 3000 years ago. They saw the world as the manifestation of an all-pervading principle they called Brahman. The Hindu religion has many gods, some more important than others, but Brahman was not a god. Brahman was an unseen principle that gave rise to all manifest existence, including all of the gods. The final chapter considers those traditions that affirmed the primacy of a direct union and experience of God. These traditions of direct union with God were found in many parts of the world in antiquity. They include the Buddhist traditions, including Zen Buddhism beginning about 500 BCE, and the neo-Platonist doctrines of Plotinus in the third century in Rome. The tradition of direct union with God can also be found in the writings of such Christian mystics as Evagrius Ponticus (in the fourth century), Denys the Areopagite (a Greek Christian theologian and philosopher of the late fifth to early sixth century) and Meister Eckhart (an influential German theologian and philosopher in the thirteenth and fourteen century). These Christian mystics in particular developed a theology of transcendence, of moving beyond the individual self and finding union with God. Many other traditions of transcendence can be found throughout history including the Sufi tradition, an offshoot of Islam and the Judaic tradition of Devekut (communion with God).

All of these traditions maintain a key tenet, namely, that one can directly experience God. The Christian mystics report a union with a God that is ‘out there’, Buddhists and rational Platonist’s report a union with an impersonal God, the ground of all being, the ONE. Despite the differing nature of the reports they all speak of a unity with all that there is. It is an experience of a very deep peace and tranquility and a loss of individual identity. It is an experience that is beyond words and concepts. This state of direct experience of God goes by many names: the ancient Hindus called it atman, William James called it pure experience and Nishida Kitarō called it acting-intuition. In this book it will called pure consciousness. In a state of pure consciousness one is free from the bonds of symbolic consciousness. One is not separate from activity and the world; one is simply part of the unfolding of the world. When in a state of pure consciousness one has found one’s true ground and centre—one knows rather than believes that their true self is all that there is. This is the perennial philosophy.

CHAPTER 1: EVOLUTION AND EMERGENCE

The Three Spheres

We begin some 13.7 billion years ago when the universe as we know it first manifested from what physicists refer to as a singularity (or the Big Bang as it is more commonly known). This singularity, this point of oneness will be referred to as the ONE. At the moment of the Big Bang, this singularity—which was un-manifest, had no size, was formless, was of infinite density, had no properties, no laws of nature, no things and no substance—suddenly manifested as energy which then formed into fields and subatomic particles. Before the singularity there was nothing, not even time. This point of singularity is almost impossible to conceptualize; indeed physicists postulate its existence only through mathematical models. Even speaking of a point of singularity as existing makes little sense as this was the time when existence itself came into being. The ONE is the source and cause of everything in the universe. The ONE, owing to its ultimate simplicity, is not directly describable. We can only grasp it indirectly by deducing what it is not. Just as white light contains all of the colors of the rainbow, the ONE contains the potentiality of all manifest existence. Over the next 13.7 billion years the universe unfolded through evolutionary principles into the world as it is today. The ALL is the universe as we know it. It is the