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Evolutionary Theory Extra-Ordinary Human Functioning
This became more and more apparent to Murphy as he listened to research psychologists, religious scholars, anthropologists, and other students of human nature at Esalen seminars during the 1960s. What he heard at these meetings convinced him first, that without fanfare an unprecedented amount of data about extraordinary human functioning was becoming publicly available in many fields; and second, that such discoveries were largely unappreciated by academics, mainstream scientists, and the general public alike. Since his undergraduate days at Stanford in the early 1950s he had been a student of Eastern and Western transformative practice as well as the works of William James, Sri Aurobindo, and other modern explorers of our greater capacities, but the Esalen seminars opened him to yet further sources of evidence regarding what Abraham Maslow, a central contributor to the Esalen program, called "the further reaches of human nature." Those seminars of the 1960s acquainted him with:
- studies such as Maslow's, Frederic Myers's, and Marghanita Laski's of religious and intellectual inspiration, ecstatic experience, psychological health, and high-level performance; While learning about these discoveries at the Esalen seminars, he also experienced a wide range of transformative practices, including methods such as: - the Alexander method, Charlotte Selver's sensory awareness, and various neo-Reichian therapies for enhancing bodily functioning, which are now embraced by the field of "somatics" or "somatic education;" By the late 1960s it seemed to Murphy that more evidence of our greater capacities was available in the world at large than most people were aware of, more perhaps--given the development of comparative religious studies and the advent of the human sciences-than at any time in world history. Meanwhile, ways to cultivate those capacities were proliferating. Some of these, such as Zen practice and Sufi contemplative prayer, came from older cultures, while others were being newly invented. As part of a project to promote emotional as well as cognitive intelligence in elementary and high school education, Esalen conducted an inventory of therapies, meditation techniques, and other transformative practices from 1968 to 1970 under the auspices of the Ford Foundation. The authors of the inventory identified some 200 ways of growth, ranging from psychoanalysis to aikido to Zen discipline, which between them comprised several thousand methods for self-cultivation. While contributing to the inventory, Murphy began to collect instances of extraordinary human experience and identify ways in which various practices trigger or support them. In 1976, this informal effort was systematized to some extent when he and a colleague at Esalen organized an archive of scientific, scholarly, and anecdotal evidence for human transformative capacities. The archive included items as diverse as articles from the New England Journal of Medicine, dossiers from the Medical Bureau at Lourdes detailing scientifically inexplicable cures observed at the famous shrine, interviews with outstanding athletes about altered states of consciousness that accompanied their record-breaking feats, and articles from the nineteenth century journal The Zoist on amputations and other operations conducted with mesmeric anaesthesia. Work on the archive was paid for by Esalen, Laurance Rockefeller, and other donors, and is now housed at the Stanford University Medical School. Using materials from the Esalen archive and other sources, Murphy wrote The Future of the Body, in which he proposed that many supernormal capacities chronicled in the sacred traditions appear as well among people engaged in transformative practices such as athletic training and the martial arts or intensely absorbing activities such as childbirth, lovemaking, and artistic endeavor. These capacities, he suggested, can be viewed as further developments of normal human capacities which in turn have evolved from our animal ancestors. Taken as a whole, they indicate that every human attribute can rise to supernormal levels and that furthermore, because they develop in different ways than they do among animals, their ongoing development suggests that there is some sort of telos in evolution. In The Future of the Body, he wrote:
. . . a frog's dim perception of light, the enhanced human vision produced by sensory training, and the apprehension of extraordinary color and vibrancy reported by contemplatives seem to form a clear line of progress, produced in turn by natural selection, sensory education, and the ego-transcending gifts, or graces, of contemplative practice. Even though these three kinds of experience (and the psychophysical modifications upon which they depend) come into existence by different processes, they appear to be stages of a single development from rudimentary sentience to supernormal perception.Murphy gave examples of such transformation related to human perception. For example, Book Three of Patanjalis Yoga Sutras, Vibhutipada, which contains a small catalogue of supernormal capacities, points the aspirant to "knowledge of the small, the hidden, or the distant by directing the light of superphysical faculty." This instruction (in Book Three's twenty-sixth sutra) refers to the animan siddhi, which includes the capacity to perceive the smallest physical things, even to the level of the anu, or atom, and see beyond them into extraphysical worlds. In the lore of Indian yoga, the animan siddhi is one of many indriyas, or subtle senses, that expand human sense perception. Some of these are visual, whether of letters, words, and sentences or of faces, interior landscapes, and supraphysical entities. Some are auditory, opening the inner ear to celestial music, the voices of distant people, or subtle vibrations of the physical world. And some involve the touch of immaterial things, or the taste and smell of elixirs for which there is no discernible physical source. Christian mystics and philosophers have borne witness to similar abilities. Origen, the third-century theologian, in his First Principles described the "spiritual senses," which:
unfold in various individual faculties: sight for the contemplation of immaterial forms, hearing for the discrimination of voices which do not echo in the empty air, taste in order to savor the living bread which came down from heaven, a sense of smell, with which Paul perceived those realities which caused him to describe himself as a sweet odor of Christ . . . and finally touch. [T]here are two modes of sense perception, one mortal, transient, and human, the other immortal, spiritual, and divine. And in both the Jewish and Islamic mystical traditions there has long been a witness to similar abilities. In the Cabala, it is said that through a life of prayer one can grow in visual acuity and learn to see the subtle effervescence, or "soul-sparks," that pervade the physical world. In Iranian mysticism, it is held that by means of spiritual "polishing" the aspirant can see suprasensory lights. Catalogues of such abilities in various sacred traditions have unmistakable resemblances in spite of the cultural, philosophic, and other differences of their participants. In short, the same supernormal capacities are described in Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, shamanic, and other religious cultures, and they appear as well in modern times as a result of athletic, martial arts, and other disciplines. They have arisen in nearly all societies for thousands of years, in spite of great differences of cultural conditioning. To support this observation, Murphy gave examples of supernormal perception and movement among athletes and artists that resemble long-acknowledged powers among yogis, shamans, and Christian saints. In conclusion, Murphy proposed that such capacities appear in disparate cultures and in all sorts of circumstances because they are part of a universal evolutionary potential, part of a greater human nature pressing to be born in us. They can be seen, he said, as "the budding limbs and organs of our latent supernature."
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