An Evolutionary Vision
A Personal Statement by George Leonard and Michael Murphy

Cosmologists tell us that our world began as some sort of seed, no larger perhaps than a needle point. There was a moment, they say, just the barest instant of time, when from that seed there arose enough energy to create everything in our universe. This stupendous beginning had no atoms, no elements as we know them now, yet it contained in potentia the billions of galaxies, the millions of species on earth, the human mind and heart. From this womb of our world would come giant red stars and lovers’ tears, supernovae and Bach choral masses, animal life and the ecstasy of saints. In that exploding seed was the potential for pain and glory, for cruelty and redeeming grace. Our heart tells us something more than chance was involved. A guiding spirit, an awareness, was there from the start.

For things could have gone wrong at many points in our world’s journey. At the very beginning, in that first instant of time, if the density of the budding universe were not what it was, all creation would have collapsed. In the words of one astrophysicist, that density required an adjustment not of one part in a thousand, not of one in a trillion, but of one part in a number beyond comprehension. At one point in the evolution of the early universe, had there not been a preponderance of matter over antimatter, the first particle collisions would have yielded nothing but energy. There would have been no stars or planets, no human heart, just radiating energy for aeons to come.

These narrow escapes were the first of many that have marked the evolutionary journey. For life, for humanity, for self-awareness to exist, the universe has had to win a cosmic lottery—not once, but again and again and again. Let us look at another close call: the genesis of heavy elements, from which our bodies and the earth are made. The creation of carbon and oxygen involved such complexity that astrophysicist Fred Hoyle said it looks like “a put-up job.” Reflecting upon the positioning of nuclear resonances that made the two elements possible, Hoyle wrote, “A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics . . . and that in nature there are no blind forces worth speaking about.” Mathematician Paul Davies used another metaphor: If you had dials for setting the initial conditions of creation and could use them to set the values needed to ultimately produce life, you would find that virtually all their settings would make the universe uninhabitable. The odds against all of them being so precisely positioned by chance, randomly, without any design or designer, are astronomically high.

Reflecting upon the stupendous cosmic coincidences and the multibillion-year defiance of the odds that evolution exhibits, we sense that a purpose, a telos, calls the universe toward a greater existence. And we find such a calling in us. There is a profound affinity between the world’s advance and our capacity for transformation, between the emergence of consciousness from the inorganic world and the emergence of new life in us. This affinity has led many thinkers to propose that the universe’s evolution is the unfolding of a spirit, or divinity, involved in inconscient matter and energy, a divinity that presses to manifest itself more fully in the course of time. This intuition, this vision, has been developed in various ways from the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Since about 1800, a striking number of the world’s most prominent philosophers have proposed that the emergence of higher organization and qualities—in individuals, societies, and the world at large—is made possible by their immanence in nature. The German philosopher Schelling called our world’s unfoldment a movement from Deus Implicitus, the implicit divine, to Deus Explicitus, the divine made manifest. His friend Hegel elaborated that idea, proposing that Geist (Spirit) gradually reveals itself through the long dialectic of history, recovering its fundamental completeness as one aspect of itself after another is subsumed in a higher fulfillment. In The Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807), he traced this process through the various stages of human history, from the slave of antiquity who struggled successfully against nature’s difficulties to the modern intellectual’s embrace of reason’s highest principles, in an attempt to show how successive forms of consciousness preserve and lift up the forms that precede them.

Involution-evolution

Henry James Sr., father of William and Henry James, also viewed the world as an unfoldment of God. For him, the inorganic, animal, and human realms press to manifest the divinity that is latent in them. “Whatsoever creates a thing,” he wrote, “gives it being, involves the thing. The Creator involves the creature; the creature evolves the Creator.”

Some fifty years later, the Indian mystic and philosopher Sri Aurobindo articulated a vision of involution-evolution that resembles that of Schelling, Hegel, and James. In his philosophical work, The Life Divine, he wrote: “If it be true that Spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the realization of God within and without is the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man upon earth.”

In the twentieth century, a similar worldview was beautifully articulated by Henri Bergson, the Nobel prize-winning author, who saw the world’s great mystics as pioneers of our human advance. And in recent years, the American philosopher Ken Wilber has integrated this perspective with the discoveries of dynamic psychiatry, developmental psychology, general systems theory, transpersonal psychology, contemporary anthropology, and other fields of inquiry.

Though their visions have differed in various ways, these thinkers regard “apparent Nature” to be “secret God,” and see divinity emerging more fully through the uneven but inexorable evolution of the universe. They have “temporalized the great chain of being,” to use historian Arthur Lovejoy’s phrase, conceiving the world’s hierarchy of inorganic, animal, and human forms “not as the inventory but as the program of nature.”

Until notions of progress and the fact of evolution became prominent in the West, visions of human betterment were usually embedded in worldviews that regarded the world to be a static or cyclical existence to which time adds nothing new. In Lovejoy’s words, the conception of the Chain of Being (the hierarchy of the manifest world, including matter, life, and humankind) was in accord with the Solomonic dictum that there is not—and never will be—anything new under the sun. But human visions change. Hegel, the elder James, and Aurobindo represent an historic shift of perspective by many thinkers from the view that the world is static to a belief that it is moving, however haphazardly, toward higher levels of existence. According to these philosophers, our growth as individuals is inextricably linked with the world’s growth. Spirit progressively manifests through us and the world’s evolution. By the unfoldment of our latent capacities, we and the world share the ongoing manifestation of the divinity latent in nature.

For such thinkers, however, divinity also exceeds the manifest world. Its immanence, or “involution,” does not limit its eternal and infinite existence. In this respect, these men agree with mystics and philosophers, East and West, who did not know about evolution but who believed that the ultimate source of things was both immanent in and transcendent to the universe. That this vision has been wedded to both evolutionary and nonevolutionary worldviews shows its lasting appeal to the philosophical imagination, and its resonance with an intuition prevalent in many times and cultures. The idea that divinity is involved in the world while at the same time retaining its timeless and unlimited existence reflects a realization, reported by countless people since antiquity, that we enjoy an essential alliance or identity with the founding principle of this universe.

This realization helps us understand humankind’s inextinguishable creativity. If the world that we know is essentially an infinitely creative spirit, creativity must be accessible to every man, woman, and child. Present-day science lends support to such a belief. We know now that the human individual is the most complex, most highly organized entity in the known universe, and that there are far more possible connections in one human brain than there are atoms in all of existence. The more we learn about the human body and brain, in fact, the more we suspect that our creative capacity, like that of the universe itself, is ultimately limitless. Even 40,000 years ago, members of our species were potentially capable of designing a space ship, playing Bach’s Goldberg Variations, and understanding abstract mathematics. Present-day inhabitants of New Guinea whose parents lived Stone Age lives are now fully engaged in twenty-first century pursuits. Clearly, the Stone Age individual was endowed with enormous surplus brainpower. We believe that, even now, we who live in the twenty-first century are similarly endowed.

In this light, our present waste of human potential is particularly tragic. As novelist James Agee puts it, “I believe that every human being is potentially capable, within his ‘limits,’ of fully ‘realizing’ his potential; that this, his being cheated and choked of it, is infinitely the ghastliest, commonest, and most inclusive of all the crimes of which the human world can accuse itself… I know only that murder is being done against nearly every individual on the planet.”

Agee’s words bring to mind the victims of war, famine, and disease, of ignorance, poverty, and injustice. They point to the dogmatism that inhibits thought, numbs the feelings, and twists the perception of entire cultures. But the crime, the “murder” of which Agee writes, affects the lives not only of those trapped by injustice or dogma or material deprivation, but also of those considered fortunate: our friends and sisters and brothers, ourselves. It is hard to imagine words more heart-wrenching than those of a close friend or relative who at the approach of death is heard to say, “I realize now that I’ve wasted my life.” Against the backdrop of the billions of years it took to give us our life and the brief time we have to experience it here, the dimensions of such waste are beyond calculation.

The waste of our human potential stands not only as a personal tragedy but also as a matter of public policy. It would be hard to specify just how much of the world’s neurosis, drug abuse, illness, crime, anger, self-loathing, and general unhappiness can be traced to our failure to develop our positive abilities. But surely people who are deeply involved in lifelong learning, in practices that encourage community, good health, and a sense of oneness with the spirit of the universe, would be unlikely to sink into the unrest, despair, and cynicism that lead to so many individual and societal ills.

Mind, body, heart, and soul

Human nature, as it turns out, is far more complex, more dynamic than previously realized. Our expectations for ourselves and our children are low simply because our understanding of what we might become is inadequate. We believe that the prospect of further human development stands before us as an ethical demand, providing useful guidance for our scientific research, education, and legislation as well as for our individual and personal choices. Such development, such an adventure, should not involve rigid, prescriptive dogma. Far from it, a greater realization of human potential should by all rights require and produce greater diversity, tolerance, and freedom.

Nor do we see the human potential primarily in terms of intellectual prowess to the neglect or denigration of our other attributes. The belief held in many cultures, past and present, that the body is separate from and inferior to the mind has brought about grievous confusion and suffering. All aspects of our being—mind, body, heart, and soul—are inextricably joined in the evolutionary adventure.

Out of matter has come life. Out of life has come feeling and thought and an apprehension of our oneness with the divine. Each of us is unique in all the universe, and yet within us can be found all the stuff of existence. If we are in the universe, the universe is also in us, and the possibilities of the human future are thus beyond the power of our imagination. Still, there remain immediate conditions to which self and society can aspire, among them the natural right of every human being to realize his or her potential to love, to learn, to feel deeply, to create. The realization of this right will not only increase individual happiness but also serve the common good.

Continue with part 2.