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EVOLUTIONARY SPIRITUALITY: CREATING A GLOBAL SPIRITUALITY FOR THE 21ST CENTURY

© Dick Rauscher

Abstract

The 21st century challenge for humanity to evolve into a more compassionate global culture is becoming critical. We must each learn to evolve out of the individual focus of the primitive ego and embrace a more mature, community based global spirituality; a spirituality based not on individual religious beliefs, but rather on our shared common ground as part of the human species; an evolutionary spirituality that embraces both the conscious evolution of our individual consciousness, and our social potential as a species. The primitive ego of the individual must learn to become a unique, yet integral part of the emerging global social community; a community that openly embraces and celebrates the radical diversity of each member. Our mainline religions must learn how to teach the spiritual practices required for this kind of diverse compassionate global community, not a set of theological doctrines that separate us. Membership in a tribal community that is based on a single set of beliefs or ethnic background is not only no longer useful, it is threatening to the survival of the human species.

It’s hard to believe that anyone in the 21st century is unable to accept the overwhelming preponderance of geologic, fossil, biological and other scientific evidence that the universe, the stars, our planet, and life on our planet are all being created through the process of evolution.

Life has been evolving on this planet for more than 3.5 billion years. Fossilized stromatolites and other fossil remains offer unambiguous evidence that life on earth evolved from small single celled-organisms into the incredible diversity of life and consciousness that lives with us on our planet.

The Christian evolutionary evangelist Michael Dowd puts it this way in his talks on the Epoch of Evolution, “we are the fruit of fourteen billion years of unbroken evolution, now becoming conscious of itself. We did not come into this world…..we grew out of it, just like an apple grows from an apple tree. We are not separate beings on earth, living in a universe….we are a mode of being of earth, an expression of the universe…..we are the universe becoming conscious of itself….we are stardust that has begun to contemplate the stars……four billion years ago, our planet was molten rock, and now it sings opera”.1

So why is it so difficult for conservative Christians to accept not only the universally accepted biological evidence of evolution, the overwhelming geologic evidence that tells the story of how our planet evolved, or the rapidly growing astronomical evidence of a growing and evolving universe? Why is it so difficult for most modern Christians to accept over 300 years of biblical scholarship; a scholarship that invites Christianity to “theologically evolve” and deliteralize the mythic stories that have been embraced without question for 2000 years?

I believe the answer is simply fear.

If the science of evolution is finally accepted, much of the theology and many of the religious beliefs of Christianity will have to undergo significant change. The main line religions will have to embrace what biblical scholars have known for much of the last century; the scriptures are primarily about mythic symbolism and metaphor, not literal history.

This causes great anxiety for Christians who, for over two thousand years, have clung to the belief that the ultimate meanings of life and death are contained in the ancient scriptures of the Christian bible. They believe that Jesus’ death gives humanity a literal victory over death. This may or may not be true. We don’t “know” this in the sense of having absolute proof; it is a faith belief that continues to bring comfort for believers.

It is hard for anyone living in modern times to understand the primitive terror that our early ancestors must have felt as they evolved into a self-conscious species aware of its own mortality. They would have been compelled not only to search for ultimate meaning to cope with their mortality, but also to explain the magical mysteries of the natural world that surrounded them.

After the evolution of reflexive consciousness; the birth of religion was inevitable.

When our religious beliefs are challenged or threatened, we are unconsciously dealing with very powerful primitive fears; the fear of a life that has no meaning and the terrifying mystery of an impending death.

Whenever our beliefs are threatened, the ego begins to defend itself. We may appear to be flexible and non-defensive on the outside, but the more our beliefs are criticized or rejected, the more fearful and aggressive we become inside. The stress and rising fear causes our ego to regress into the concrete, dualistic, black and white thinking of childhood; a primitive ego where things are either safe or unsafe, good or bad, right or wrong. This primitive ego or old brain is sometimes referred to as our 7-8 year old inner-child.

When this happens, we begin to close off from whomever is perceived to be attacking us. Our empathy for the other diminishes. We move toward the center of the universe. We become lost in an inflated sense of our own importance. Our genetic programming for self-defense kicks in and we become more and more aggressive. Our compassion and concern for the well-being of the other is quickly replaced by anger and eventually rage.

Of course the primitive ego of the other person is now also emerging because their beliefs and opinions are also being aggressively challenged. Unless both parties can soften their position by embracing the reality that their beliefs are simply ideas that attempt to define reality and are not literal reality itself, the inevitable result will be significant conflict and alienation. Communication will eventually come to an end.

Let me try to illustrate how this happens in the real world. I will use the Garden of Eden story from Genesis since I know the Christian bible better than the sacred texts and stories of the other religions.

The theology of Christianity is based in large part on the assumptions contained in the Garden of Eden creation story; a story that illustrates that humans are a fallen, sinful people who can survive only through the grace of God and God’s forgiveness.

Since ancient times, Christian’s have believed that God sacrificed His son Jesus on the cross, and through Passover theology it came to be understood that Jesus was the “sacrificial lamb”; that at His death His blood washed away the sinfulness of humanity. It is through faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection that Christians are “saved”. This religious belief and its promise of eternal life in heaven has brought comfort and a sense of safety to members of the Christian faith for centuries. Life has meaning. Death has been defeated.

However, if we accept the scientific evidence of modernity that creation is accomplished through the process of change and evolution, then there is the possibility that we are not a fallen species after all; that we are simply a very young emerging, evolving species.

Evolution would suggest that we have never been a perfect species that somehow fell into sinfulness, we are merely an evolving species of life that only recently achieved self-awareness or reflexive self-consciousness; perhaps as recently as 35 thousand years ago. A few milliseconds ago in “universe” time. It means we are a very young species indeed!

Thus, if we embrace the concepts of evolution as reality, then the Garden of Eden story may only be a metaphoric story that offers an important new theological understanding; that with the birth of reflexive consciousness and thought, which came to humanity through the process of evolution, we merely lost our innocence.

It may be simply a metaphoric story about a young species forced by its evolving self-consciousness to leave the psychological place of safety and innocence it shared with all other animal life and begin a lonely search for ultimate meaning. The path back to the innocence of Eden was forever barred for Adam and Eve by a few simple questions.

Where did we come from?

Where did I come from?

Where did everything come from?

Why are we here?

What happens after we die?

Is death a punishment?

In other words, if evolution is accepted as a modern scientific reality, then the beliefs and theology of Christianity must be reexamined so as to be relevant to an educated 21st century consciousness. The myths, metaphors, and stories of the Christian bible contain much of humanity’s great wisdom and insight, but the consciousness of modern humanity is no longer capable of embracing in any literal sense the scientific and social beliefs of a culture that lived 2000 to 3000 years ago. The Bible has become primarily a collection of metaphoric wisdom stories, not literal history.

Conservative Christians know that the only way their 2000 year old version of Christian theology can survive in the 21st century is by passionately rejecting change; virtually all change, including that of evolution itself!

This grasping to the past was clearly illustrated when the Pope only recently accepted the work of Galileo by admitting that the earth is not the center of the universe.

The inability of the mainline religions to accept that evolution is a scientific reality is frightening and disturbing to educated persons living in the modern world. At the same time, the headlong rush into modernity is frightening and disturbing to those people of faith who find ultimate meaning for their lives in the ancient beliefs of their religions.

Finding a path between these two realities will be challenging.

Facts are facts. They cannot be ignored simply because they challenges us to change and grow; regardless of how uncomfortable or frightening that change might be for us.

Like many of my professional religious colleagues, I have struggled with the religious beliefs of my childhood for most of my life. Even today, it comes as a shock to realize how deeply the old beliefs are embedded as “truths” in my unconscious. For example it was 15 years from the beginning of my formal theological training before I realized how profoundly and how deeply my simple acceptance of evolutionary science impacted my theology.

Much of my spiritual journey as an ordained pastor and pastoral psychotherapist has been a quest to find ultimate meaning; to understand and discover a God and faith beliefs that give meaning to both my life and the lives of others. I still believe that Jesus, Buddha, and some of the other great mystics are the source of much wisdom, but only if we go back and wrestle with who they were and what they taught. How did they so clearly manifest the ultimate? Why were people who met them so profoundly changed? The Gospels were simply the attempts of the people that lived back then to answer these questions.

My response to the Christian conservatives and fundamentalists would be “Don’t be afraid”. God is still God. The evolution of Christian beliefs will not mean the death of Christianity. It will only mean that like everything else in the universe, Christianity’s 2000 year old theological beliefs must also evolve to remain meaningful in the 21st century. The words of Jesus are still as powerful today as they were 2000 years ago. I would say the same to conservatives and fundamentalists of any religion. The evolution of your beliefs and scriptures from a literal interpretation to a metaphoric understanding will make your religion more relevant, not less!

A rigid, unchanging theology that claims to forever and ever own “The Truth” is guilty of religious supremacy and must give way to a more flexible and gentle interpretation of ultimate meaning or face the danger of being seen as irrelevant or at worst, malevolent.

The message of love and compassion contained in all the world’s great religions must be placed in the context of an evolutionary spirituality so as to be understandable and meaningful for all humans of the 21st century.

The problems facing us in the 21st century are global. We need global solutions, a global spirituality, and we need more complex global social thinking. Like it or not, we are becoming a global community living on a shrinking planet. In our age of atomic weapons, pollution, and fundamentalist terrorism, primitive us versus them tribal thinking will destroy us.

We need new global mimes. A new vision of who we are and where we are going as a species. Our mainline religions need to get out of tribal politics, abandon primitive tribal beliefs, and become a force of reason that leads us toward a compassionate global community. Primitive tribal beliefs must be challenged, not because they are wrong, but simply because they are no longer useful: when we grasp them too tightly, they become destructive to the principles of compassion and diversity needed to build global community.

The only spirituality that makes sense in this context is an evolutionary spirituality that embraces the conscious evolution of our social potential as a species. I call this new mime the conscious evolution of our essential nature; i.e. learning to walk an awakened, enlightened middle path toward a compassionate, global, human community.

The dangerous illusion of our primitive ego that we are all separate, unique individuals that are not connected, not part of, must give way to the reality that we are an evolving “species”. There is nothing we have that has not come from someone or something outside of ourselves. The reality is simple. If our species does not survive and evolve, we as individuals will not survive. We are part of the human family whether we understand that reality or not.

Evolutionary spirituality means simply that the evolution of consciousness on this planet must become the imperative for human evolution. Many biologists believe that the future evolution of humanity as a reflexive self-conscious species will happen primarily as a growth in consciousness itself; a movement of consciousness from individual human potential to the social potential of the global human community. A conscious growth toward social complexity and the integration of diversity.

We must grow quickly from the pro-creative, survival of the fittest mentality that has served the survival of humanity well for thousands of years and move into a co-creative and conscious evolution of our species. A self reflective, interconnected, global human culture that Teilhard de Chardin calls the emerging noosphere.

Futurist Barbara Marx Hubbard says that each of us is a vital and important cell in the new “socially conscious global organism / community” that humanity is currently in the process of birthing. She reminds us that the gifts and skills of every individual / cell are absolutely essential and needed by this new global community / organism.

We must awaken to our essential self, to the localized “i am”. We are simply a localized wave in the ocean of I AM. We are a conscious, co-creative part of the evolving universe; an integral and necessary part of the global awakening. I believe this evolution of consciousness, is the most important challenge for humans in the 21st century. We are clearly running out of time.

SUMMARY

A compassionate global spirituality requires that we challenge all black and white thinking that attempts to literalize scriptural mythic stories and then insist they represent the “truth”. Like other supremacy beliefs such as racial, male, sexual, or Arian, the conservative, rigid, unchanging beliefs of all the major world religions must eventually yield to the growing and evolving consciousness of the human species; a consciousness that understands the urgent need for a diverse, flexible, compassionate, global spirituality,……or they will continue to die.

Authentic spirituality is achieved by becoming self-aware, developing the insights and spiritual practices required to become compassion not simply be compassionate, and most importantly, by learning to pay careful attention to what we are actually manifesting in the world.

Over time, we must all come to understand that, in the end, only love and compassion bring meaning to the journey. Fear can be a powerful force: but so too are reason and compassion.

Whether we are comfortable with it or not, change is the force behind creation and since there is no form without consciousness, the most important question any human can ask is “What am I creating? What am I manifesting? Compassion or intolerance, judgment, and bigotry?”

In other words, when reflexive consciousness evolved in the human species some 35,000 years ago, humans became localized co-creators with God. What gets created in this corner of the universe is now a responsibility we each share with God.

I believe the choice is simple.

We can either manifest unconditional love and compassion, or the intolerance, judgment, and bigotry of a conditional love that is based on the “because” of an ego belief. Only when we are in touch with our “i am” or essential self are we capable of sustained unconditional love.

Learning to let go of rigid beliefs so as to embrace an attitude of “not knowing” is the first step toward enlightenment.

1) WIE, Issue 25, May-July 2004, Preachers of a New Pentecost, by Carter Phipps, Pg. 93ff