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Evolutionary Theory The New Paradigm of Consciousness
Russell offered that there needs to be a taxonomy of the term consciousness. Although he knows of many different definitions of the word, he has boiled them down to two essential categories: 1) the faculty of consciousness and 2) the form of consciousness. The faculty of consciousness is called purusha in India. It is the fact of experience, of interiority, of subjectivity. The form of consciousness is called prakriti in India. It is the nature of how consciousness takes shape, such as perception or memory. Russell believes that we need to perceive consciousness as going “all the way down.” While our current paradigm is fixated on the belief that consciousness begins with the higher nervous system, we need a new language to help describe how all things are conscious. Some call this view pan-psychism or pan-interiority. Russell prefers the term pan-sentience, even though that term has its limits too. Unfortunately, our language is so intertwined with our current scientific paradigm that we do not have adequate terms to express this new emerging worldview of consciousness. Another important point Russell offered was that all objective, scientific knowledge is mediated by human consciousness. As Immanuel Kant pointed out, all we ever know is our personal reconstruction of the external world. We never know the external world directly. Our knowledge is always mediated by our personal experience and our reconstruction of the external. In Vedanta, this is maya, or illusion. But Russell pointed out that it would be better to call it delusion, because it is not that the external world is illusory; but rather that we are deluded when we mistake the world of experience for the external world. We have a delusional perception of the external world, not an illusory one. Russell believes that if we were to make the paradgim shift that he sees emerging and if we were to accept that consciousness is the fundamental reality, then the nature of our questions would start to change. The fundamental issue would become: how does consciousness take on all the forms we see? Yogis, rishis, and saints have often claimed that they can see in their own minds how forms arise in consciousness. In this new paradigm of consciousness, science as we know it would not cease, but rather a new way of understanding and questioning would be opened up. Russell believes that it is by the bridge of consciousness that the age-old conflict between science and religion will be solved. Russell even offers that we might start to realize that “Consciousness” is God and that we are creators of our own universe. We play a role in the ongoing evolution of consciousness. We are part of the forms and qualities that emerge and change in the evolutionary process. What, then, is the nature of the human self in this new orientation? Russell discussed how yogis often have claimed that we are only half-awake to our true nature. We identify with a limited sense of self due to our pain and suffering. Paralleling some of the comments that Jenny Wade made at the end of her presentation, Russell pointed out that the human ego-self seems to be a survival mechanism. In this view, the self is an evolutionary tool for survival, and thus at this moment in our evolution we have a new and different task than that of our previous eras of survival-motivated existence. We now have the opportunity to dissolve the ego-self and let go or survival-based thinking. Instead of changing the external world to achieve comfort and meet our survival needs, we are now, at this evolutionary moment, called to turn inward to the nature of consciousness itself. We can now change the very way we interpret the world. Quoting Epictitus, Russell offered that “people are disturbed not by things but by the view they take of them.” At this moment, Russell believes we need to take responsibility for our own interpretation of the world. The calling of our moment, then, is to awaken to our own experience of consciousness. The saints and yogis were heralds of where we must all go individually. Russell stated that if we do not evolve, the human race is in peril of self-destructing. At the same time, however, we are also at a potentially crowning moment in which we can recognize and appreciate the true nature of consciousness. As the British evolutionary scholar, Julian Huxley, said, “in humans, evolution becomes conscious of itself.” The ultimate awakening is to realize the true nature of it all: that it is all consciousness. Another intriguing line of inquiry that Russell brought up was the nature of evolutionary acceleration. Not only does each level of evolution stand upon the shoulders of the previous level (mind on top of life, which is on top of matter), but as Terrence McKenna has pointed out, each successive phase increases the rate of acceleration—the rate of the introduction of novelty. In other words, evolution not only introduces new domains, but it also is speeding up its process of unfolding in each of those domains. If evolution were charted on a graph, Russell believes the curve of its span over time would be hyperbolic. It is going up faster and faster. At some point the curve will go vertical, and Russell calls this point the white hole in time, contrasting it with black holes in space. In an attempt to draw a comparison, Russell described the accelerating evolution of a star. At first, its internal combustion will consume hydrogen, producing helium, then when the hydrogen is consumed the star goes through the faster process of burning helium to produce carbon. Then the process accelerates further as it burns carbon to produce neon, and so on. Eventually, it will explode as a supernova and collapse into a black hole. Will the evolution of consciousness on earth proceed in a similar way? Will there be a supernova of consciousness on earth? What will be on the other side of the explosion or the other side of the vertical line on the graph? There were a number of other interesting reactions and discussion points in response to Russell’s presentation. One of the first topics tackled was the nature of time. Michael Murphy offered that the Indian mystic, Sri Aurobindo, discussed the way in which the timeless and eternal will enter into the time-bound. One possible future scenario is one in which life will be pervaded by the timeless. The evolutionary process will not stop, though, it will just have a timeless dimension that is part of its unfolding. Another interesting issue was whether Russell’s system was inherently dualistic. Tony Rothman felt that Russell had separated the laws of consciousness apart from the laws of the phenomenal world, and thus there was an inherent dualism to his system. David Griffin, however, felt that this was not necessarily the case. He pointed out that Russell’s system could potentially allow that consciousness, or what David calls “experience,” is an intrinsic part of all of manifest and material reality. Therefore, the only dualism is between appearance and reality, not consciousness and the material world. Griffiin believes that Russell’s system allows for an epistemic duality, but not an ontological dualism. Russell responded by emphasizing that his main point is that people often forget that what we perceive as reality in our senses is not reality in and of itself. We need to be ever mindful of this distinction. In response to the belief that the internet and world wide web will accelerate evolution, George Leonard noted that those technological inventions do not necessarily lead to interior, psychic development, and, in fact, sometimes so much focus on the internet does just the opposite. Interestingly, Russell pointed out in reply that the Jesuit paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, did not take account of the way that television and the internet might accelerate evolution in his famous book, The Phenomenon of Man. Russell shared that just before his death Teilhard remarked that television would speed up the arrival of the Omega Point, which is his term for the convergence point of evolutionary and spiritual transcendence. In response to the idea of accelerating evolution, David Deamer noted that in biology there have always been regulatory processes that influence the evolutionary process at critical moments. Thus, Deamer believes that the hyperbolic growth that Russell predicted will eventually be slowed down by such regulatory mechanisms. Russell replied that we know there are limits to biological and technological growth, but are there limits to internal change? Are there limits to the change in internal consciousness? And will the stresses of our current moment force such internal changes? Steve Dinan noted that new domains of evolution arose in the past, such as the emergence of life from matter, and therefore we might see new domains entering in the near future. Finally, George Sudarshan and Jay Ogilvy ended the session by returning to the call for science to study the nature of first person experience. In the Indian religious tradition and in the Western tradition of phenomenology there is an attempt to engage directly with consciousness as it is experienced by humans. Science needs to seriously study this.
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