Where Did Man Go Wrong? Part Four

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The great irony of evolution is that, though it took billions of years to evolve a brain capable of awareness of the sacred through self-knowing, employing time prevents us from the realization of that potential.

Most people believe, consciously or sub-consciously, that man is either made in the image of God, or man is incapable of changing. Indeed, some people hold both views at once!

The first thing to realize is that consciousness is not ‘evolving.’ Consciousness, as we generally know it, cannot evolve; it can only accumulate. And by psychologically accumulating experience, content-consciousness has deteriorated and darkened to the point of spiritual suffocation.

Except for science and technology, man is declining, and it appears quite rapidly. Increasingly disconnected from nature since the Industrial Revolution, the accretion of the past is now eroding the essence of what it has meant to be human since time immemorial.

We humans are also in the process of wiping out half the animals with which we share the earth. We are on the brink of a nuclear arms race that will make us nostalgic for the Cold War. Drought, famine, disease, and terror are poised to make quantum leaps.

A leap of consciousness is required simply to preserve what is left of the richness of ecological and cultural diversity, much less for a majority of the next generation to grow into human beings.

That appears unlikely at this point in human history. And yet, the worse things get, and the more self-destructive man’s self-made world becomes, the clearer the imperative of radical change in consciousness. Short of that, the man-made momentum of division, fragmentation, and self-interest will continue to grow, and overwhelm the best-laid plans.

Certainly life is not unique to one planet out of billions in this galaxy alone. And it’s man’s hubris to think that there aren’t other sentient species that have successfully or unsuccessfully passed through the planetary crisis that man, using thought, has generated on the earth.

A sentient species is one that constructs and is conscious of self. As such, humans are the only sentient animals on earth. With sentience also comes the capacity for self-knowing and self-transcendence, and humans are the only animals with that unrealized potential as well.

But as it is, the human brain is dominated by the functions of symbolic thought. That is, it lives by words, images, beliefs, traditions, and opinions—in short, conditioning. A transforming human being, on the other hand, is no longer dominated by conditioning, but is moving in the direction of insight and liberation.

At bottom, thought rests on ‘the ability to remove and make ready for use.’ That is the literal definition of separation. There are no ‘things’ in actuality, and therefore there is no mind-to-hand or mind-to-mind manipulation without thought--whether rudimentary as in our closest cousins, the chimpanzees, or cognitively developed, as in humans.

Symbolic thought is the most powerful adaptation that has ever arisen on earth. It is so powerful that it is impossible to believe that it could have arisen on this planet alone.

Used unwisely, as it generally is, thought becomes inimical to life. As such, symbolic thought generates a growing existential crisis and conundrum for the species in which it evolves.

In the end, perhaps the evolution of ‘higher thought’ is a crucible. My gut feeling is that the species in which it evolves either awakens a growing insight into thought and the content-consciousness that flows from it, or they perish from the universe.

The true conjunction of religion and science is not in some fantasy of co-existence between faith and fact. Rather, it is in seeing where the mind as thought (of which science is one of the highest expressions) ends, and the mind as stillness and insight begins.

The understanding of thought would not make humanity less scientific or technological, just much wiser in our application of both.

The human brain is the ‘pinnacle of creation’ when it negates the movement of thought, ends psychological time, and is completely still. Then the human being is one with the silence, sacredness, and creativity that permeate the universe.

That is the new foundation we must pour within ourselves if we are to manifest and build a world in which peace, justice, and harmony are not just increasingly hollow words.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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