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(Continued
from page 4)
It was bound
to happen sooner or later that self-aware people swimming along in
the stream of cultural evolution should raise their heads high
enough above the swirling currents to perceive the whole stream
itself, to conceive of an evolutionary world view. The idea was
present in some circles in Ancient Greece, and perhaps in China
too (see Appendix).
As far as I can tell, though, and this seems rather strange, only
one of those axial sages who founded a great tradition of thought
and religion also had a profoundly evolutionary vision. That was
the Buddha. Consequently, only Buddhism among the major spiritual
traditions seems to be intrinsically evolutionary (although
similar notions can be traced in Chinese thought).
To simplify drastically, Judaism and its daughter religions,
including Christianity, see humanity as enacting a grand
historical drama, initiated and concluded by a non-natural, divine
intervention. Before, the theatre is in an eternity of darkness;
after, the actors are consigned to an indefinite period of
`resting': in passive bliss if heroes, in cruel torment if
villains. In mainstream Hinduism, on the other hand, the cosmos is
cyclic. Life and humanity perpetually renew a dance of emergence
from and return to a ground of Being.
This is not to dismiss the heroic efforts of sincere thinkers
from many backgrounds, especially Christians, to reconcile an
evolutionary view with bounded myths such as the Christian one of
creation, fall, redemption, and judgement. Yet still I maintain
that Buddhism is the most evolutionary of traditions, by far. When
I began to explore Buddhist ideas, that evolutionary perspective
seemed one of its most attractive features.
Its chief concern is with the higher evolution of the individual.
It also has several myths of the origins of humanity, all being
evolution stories. But these are given very little prominence in
Buddhism, and I feel that much of their usefulness has been
superseded by the beautiful and accurate origin-accounts of
Darwinian evolution. (These myths are not a part of the argument
of this book, but some have been included for interest in the
Appendix.
I have never encountered a Buddhist who takes them literally,
though doubtless such do exist.)
Chapter
8 covers the process
by which the founder of Buddhism traversed the path of higher
evolution, and the terms that he and his followers used to
describe the evolutionary foundations of that path. Chapter
9 shows how full
self-reflective consciousness is equivalent to the Buddhist term
`mindfulness', and describes the progressive sequence of states of
consciousness that can be cultivated from a basis of mindfulness,
according to the Buddhist tradition. We shall see that the most
expanded and blissful meditative states are valuable, but are
quite different from the kind of consciousness which is Buddhism's
objective.
There is a characteristic -- self-transcendence
-- that marks the history of consciousness as an evolution
in the full sense, and not just a meandering process of change.
Individual animals that pioneered new behaviours and thus opened
the way for new species to evolve were transcending their
inherited habits of life. The axial sages who had the courage to
use their self-awareness to explore hidden potentials of
consciousness were also transcending themselves. Chapter
10 looks at the
Buddhist methods for completing the process of self-transcendence.
In chapter 10 we investigate the faculty of unlimited awareness
that does not recognise the time-honoured boundaries between
internal and external experience, and which culminates in
enlightenment. Its effect on life is compassion -- the
final achievement of higher evolution. Compassion is the disowning
of any vestiges of self-other boundaries which might distinguish
one's own interests from another's. Compassion is the overwhelming
impulse to dedicate one's life to the happiness and fulfilment of
every being that plays and suffers in those oceans and on those
beaches of evolution.
From the Introduction to The Evolving Mind, by Robin
Cooper.
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