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SUMMARY OF THE EVOLVING
MIND
In lower evolution, mind, that is, consciousness,
has evolved. It has evolved in two vehicles: in
physical bodies, which have developed through
biological evolution, and in the collective
traditions of animal and human behaviour,
evolving through cultural evolution. Its
evolution can continue in any self-aware person
through higher evolution. The evolution of
consciousness, then, is the string upon which the
successive chapters of the book are strung.
Chapter 1 shows how
evolution can be seen as continual
self-transcendence, and stresses the importance
of this concept. Charles Darwin, we shall see,
demonstrated the reality of evolution and
discovered its mechanism. Chapter
2
explains this mechanism -- natural
selection -- and gives an account of
the biological evolution of the lineages of
living forms that gave rise to human beings. Chapter
3
looks at how animals' minds appeared, and at the
stages the mind traversed as it evolved. Chapter
4
describes how mental factors, via animal
behaviour, have influenced the biological process
of evolution. Is there also a unique spiral
process, intrinsic to consciousness, by which any
mind has a tendency to stimulate the production
of more sophisticated minds in future
generations? Chapter 4 goes on to consider the
evolution of culture in animals.
A great turning point in the evolution of
consciousness was reached with the first
appearance of people who could be aware of their
own awareness. This self-reflective consciousness
is the topic of chapter 5.
The history of the evolving mind is a chronicle
of the successive attainment of new, less limited
levels of consciousness. Different species of
animals achieve different degrees of mental
capacity. Any individual person fluctuates
greatly in the scope of his or her awareness. I
spend time each night in a deep and dreamless
sleep in which awareness is all but extinguished,
but at times I can feel quite bright and alert,
fully self-conscious. And exceptional people seem
to have attained to states of mind in which the
boundaries of awareness are stretched and
attenuated to an unimaginable extent.
Our brains have been big enough for
self-reflective consciousness for a very long
time: they have not significantly changed in size
for a hundred millennia. Occasionally, during
those thousands of generations, the right kind of
mind has found itself in the right kind of
cultural environment for self-knowledge to dawn.
This seems to be as far as collective forms of
mental evolution can take us -- to an
illuminated awareness of standing at the gateway
to unexplored domains of human experience.
Every person, perhaps many times in their life,
is like an amphibian washed up on a beach: the
beach of self-awareness. Behind is the fertile
ocean of lower evolution, teeming with living
forms. Ahead is the unknown continent, invisible
behind a ridge of shingle. It is so tempting to
return to the supportive and nurturing billows of
relative unconsciousness, and let them bear one
dimly through a life like a million other lives.
The alternative, the landward journey, must be
undertaken by an individual decision, an
individual effort. In other words self-reflective
consciousness is the prerequisite for higher
evolution, and higher evolution is not an
automatic product of a particular stage in the
evolution of bodily form, of mental capacity or
of human culture. It is a personal choice,
repeatedly available to each man and woman.
The first records of attempts at exploring
consciousness from the base of self-reflection
turn up in the `axial age', considered in
chapter 6. The period of a few
centuries around 500 BCE is axial in that
innovative individuals in several parts of the
world initiated -- independently, and
at the same time -- many fateful new
movements in history. All the great world
religions can trace their origins to this period,
even those whose founders lived much later, and
virtually all the possible major standpoints in
human thought seem to have been discovered then. Chapter
7
concentrates on these axial age pioneers, and the
universal religions that some of them
inaugurated.
(Continued on
page 5)
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