Episode 6 - Conscious Evolution
SUMMARY
Do you want to know the meaning of life?
references
Daniel Schmactenberger on The Future Thinkers Podcast
Daniel Schmactenberger on A New and Ancient Story
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
Teilhard de Chardin
transcript
RC: Dear listeners, this is the final episode of the series, and I could not be more excited to share it with you. I may sound professional and serious, but behind that there is an excited little geek living his dream of sharing the philosophy of Conscious Evolution with the world.
But I’m not done yet. This series is all about explaining what Conscious Evolution is, and how it can provide our lives with meaning and purpose. But I’ve barely touched on how we can actually put Conscious Evolution into practice, as individuals or collectively.
To do that properly I want to make two more series. I have some truly visionary evolutionary thinkers I’d like to share with you, from spiritual teachers to systems theorists, but to put all that together and produce a high quality audio experience costs money.
I am looking for funders and sponsors for the next series. If you believe in Conscious Evolution and would be interesting in making that happen, then please get in touch via consciousevolution.co.uk, or alternatively, you can support the podcast and the whole project at patreon.com/evoconscious. Thank you.
Welcome to Conscious Evolution
An Antidote to Meaninglessness
a podcast by Robert Cobbold
Question: If an omnipotent, omnipresent, all pervading God exists, then what does God lack?
Answer: Limitation.
Not to blaspheme, but this must make life rather boring.
No limitations means there are no challenges to surmount, no weaknesses to overcome. Everything is whole, complete and perfect, sure, but that means there’s nothing left to be learnt, no personal growth left to strive for, and no surprises.
So what does God do? God decides to play a game.
What is a game exactly? What is the essence of a game?
One definition of a game is the process of voluntarily setting oneself limitations and hurdles. It’s not strictly necessary to jump over the bar, run between the lines or put the ball through the hoop. Your survival does not depend on any of these things. Rather you set yourself these limitations and hurdles simply because it’s fun to see if you can overcome them.
And that’s what God decides to do. God voluntarily sets themself some limitations to enjoy the challenge of transcending them.
This notion is beautifully encapsulated by an old Sufi story which goes like this.
One day, God made a statue of themselves in clay.
When they had finished, they stood back to admire their work, and they were pleased.
But then they noticed that something was missing. The statue lacked the one thing that God prized in themselves most – their spark and vitality.
So God asked Spirit to enter the clay statue and imbue it with life. But Spirit was free and without limitation and liked to fly and soar. Spirit did not want to enter this material prison in the least.
And so God asked their angels to play their most heavenly music. And Spirit, who liked nothing more than to play and to dance, was moved to ecstasy.
But Spirit had no physical form; the music passed right through Spirit as if Spirit was not there. Sweet ecstasy became tinged with sadness, and Spirit ached with longing to feel the vibrations of the music more deeply.
And so in order to make the music more clear to itself, in order to feel the vibrations of the music in physical form, Spirit relented, and entered this body.
According to Sufi Saint Hazrat Inayat Khan, there are two important truths to be gleaned from this story. The first, is that the original nature of spirit is to be free, and the suffering inherent in life is the absence of that same freedom. The second, is that spirit has entered the physical world to experience the music of life and to make this music clear to itself.
And when we put these two truths together, the third truth comes to mind: that the unlimited part of ourselves becomes limited and earthbound in order to experience the joy of transcending those limitations and eventually returning back towards its original state of freedom.
Therefore, as Hazrat Inayat Khan writes: there is a loss and a gain. And that’s the bittersweet symphony of this great game of life.
We began this series by asking a simple question: how can we be happy? But after consulting some positive psychology researchers we came to the conclusion that pursuing happiness for its own sake doesn’t actually work. A much better strategy is to pursue what you find meaningful, because in so doing, happiness tends to come as a by-product.
And so our question of how to be happy in life quickly became a question of how to find meaning in life. And all of the research we could find seemed to be pointing in the direction of three pillars of a meaningful life: cooperation, creativity and transcendence.
And as we came to examine each of these pillars in turn we came to a rather surprising conclusion.
From the very beginning, the beginning even of time itself, cooperation, creativity and transcendence have been woven into the fabric of the evolutionary journey all the way from the big bang to the present moment, from a cloud of hydrogen gas to human civilisation. These three pillars are part of evolution’s arrow.
From single cells to multicellular organisms to groups of multicellular organisms like beehives, shoals of fish and troops of monkeys, evolution has gradually formed ever larger cooperatives. And this pattern has been repeated with humans: we have gone from bands to tribes to chieftainships to city states to nation states, and we are on the verge, hopefully, of forming a cooperative which spans the planet.
At the same time evolution has become more and more creative and evolvable. It acquires new mechanisms which are more efficient and more effective at discovering successful adaptions, and that allows for the rate of evolution to gather pace. In other words: as it has progressed, evolution has got better at evolving.
So while single celled organisms reproduced asexually for nearly 3bn years with very little increase in complexity or diversity, the emergence of sexual reproduction dramatically sped up evolution and in a billion years produced a kaleidoscope of plants, birds, reptiles and eventually humans who are so adaptable and creative that we have the ability to evolve culturally.
But even though human cultural evolution is many times more efficient and effective than biological evolution, it’s still hampered by the fact that it’s not a fully conscious process. Much of it is underpinned by the same unconscious instincts and urges which our evolutionary heritage has furnished us with such as the drive to accumulate wealth, status and power, to hoard resources, to engage in violent in-group/out-group behaviour, even our cravings for sugar. In a hunter gatherer context where we lived in small groups, violence between groups was common, and food and resources were scarce, all of these behaviours and instincts may have made evolutionary sense.
But in our overpopulated, technologically advanced world, where food is in abundance, violent conflict is rare, and climate breakdown on the horizon, these behaviours are not only detrimental to our individual health and wellbeing, they’re starting to threaten the survival of our species as a whole.
And yet we’re still saddled with the same stone age biological programming. And so a colossal amount of human cultural evolution has evolved to satisfy these stone age desires whether it’s video games, luxury cars, porn, tribalism of all kinds, even fast food.
Here’s evolutionary theorist John Stewart:
JOHN STEWART: The food that we like, for example, has been shaped by our evolutionary history in the savannah. Fat was in short supply, so modern fast food outlets make use of that biological predisposition we have towards eating fat by putting high levels of fat in their food and that clearly limits our adaptability and can limit our lives and so on. We can die earlier, the obesity epidemic is a product of that evolutionary predisposition. But it's not just that, it's all our desires, all our morality, all our ethical predispositions and so on, have been shaped and constrained by past evolution.
RC: So if we can no longer depend on our biological programming and the strategies of past evolution as a reliable guide to evolutionary success what can we rely on?
If the last transition in evolvability was the emergence of cultural evolution, what is the next? What new mechanism will evolution acquire to lead us through the third millenium? What is the next great evolutionary leap forward?
Welcome to the Dawn of Conscious Evolution.
The moment humanity developed a theory of our own evolution, evolution became conscious of itself. Think about that for a moment. We are evolution become conscious of itself.
And when that happened, a critical feedback loop was connected, and that feedback loop allows us to evolve in a new way. It’s not an easy thing to conceptualise or even describe, and the best way I can do so is using the example of individual self-awareness.
As individuals, when we aren’t aware of what’s driving our behaviour, it’s very hard to exert any self-control. That’s why if you’re trying to change a pattern of behaviour, the first thing you need to do is to become aware of them, to identify the unconscious triggers which prompt you to get angry, or reach for a another glass of wine or buy a chocolate bar or whatever it is that you’re trying to change. Because if you can become truly self-aware in those moments then you have given yourself a choice. You’re no longer stuck in an automatic pattern of behaviour.
What I’m trying to describe here is very similar, except we’re talking about the self-awareness not of individuals, but of the evolutionary process as a whole.
Here’s evolutionary philosopher Daniel Schmactenberger on the Future Thinkers Podcast:
DANIEL SCHMACTENBERGER: Until very recently humans didn’t have any concept of what evolution was. And we only recently did and we’re only right now beginning to have a deep sense of what it actually is, not just biologic natural selection. But the process by which subatomic particles come into atoms, come into molecules, come into more complex organic structures, dust clouds turn into stars in spiral galaxies. That evolution is this process of increasing orderly complexity in a way that has more and more synergy. So, more and more emergent property. And the emergent properties define the arrow of evolution.
And as we’re starting to understand this, you know, like very few people, but the beginning of us are starting to understand this. We can actually become conscious agents of evolution. We can like, say, “Holy shit, the universe is actually doing something. It’s actually moving in this direction of increasing orderly complexity, ee can consciously participate with that.” And we move from just being part of the whole, where evolution is just kind of this unconscious algorithmic process to thinking about, feeling about, identifying with, and being an agent for the whole.
And so, then evolution itself becomes an agentically mediated process, like we actually say, “Shit, the whole evolutionary process resulted in me. I am the result of this whole evolutionary process. So, in a way, the evolutionary process has kind of awoke to itself in me as I’m contemplating it.” And so then we stop needing “push” by evolutionary pressure and pain to evolve, and we start being able to evolve consciously by what Teilhard de Chardin called the lure of becoming. Because we actually identify as evolutionaries, right, as part of the evolutionary impulse. And in doing so really obsolete the need for pain as an evolutionary driver. So human nature has the capacity to transcend much of what human behaviour has been so far.
RC: This ability for evolution to become aware of itself, to become conscious, represents a fundamental evolutionary transition, and a huge leap forward in evolvability. Because up till now evolution has been a blind process of trial and error, an unconscious algorithmic process as Daniel Schmactenberger describes it. From the big bang onwards, cosmological and biological evolution all unfolded almost automatically, each new development pushed mechanistically by the laws of the universe. As Integral theorist Steve McIntosh explains:
STEVE MCINTOSH: Evolution in the cosmological realm prior to the emergence of life, it precedes as a series of downhill reactions guided by entropy, right? Science explains cosmological evolution as simply the unfolding of the material potentials that were there at the beginning of the big bang. So it precedes inexorably, right, certainly without any purpose. Then we have the emergence of life which is said to be contingent, but nevertheless is said to evolve inexorably, that is unstoppably or automatically, through the process of random mutation followed by environmental selection.
RC: Take the classic example of the Giraffe’s long neck. Giraffes did not evolve long necks because they looked into the future, anticipated that long necks would help them survive and reproduce and then decided to grow them. Due to random genetic mutation and sexual reproduction, there was just a variation in neck sizes amongst the giraffe population, and the giraffes which had the genes for a long neck had a slight advantage, making them more likely to survive and more likely to reproduce. And so eventually, after many generations, all giraffes will have inherited the genes for a long neck.
But the flipside of that is that all the giraffes without the gene for a long neck gene have to die off. And so the evolution of the giraffe’s long neck, can only come about through a great deal of pain. Because unconscious evolution has no capacity to look forward and anticipate problems, it has to be pushed forwards by evolutionary pressure and pain.
Carter Phipps, author of the book Evolutionaries, likens it to driving using only the rear-view mirror.
CARTER PHIPPS: You kind of have to run into a wall right to know that you've got to change direction right? You have to really…that's the only thing that gives you the outside input that knows you have to go a different way, right. You don't have the capacity to see forward and anticipate, so it's only when you encounter these massive problems that you can steer the other way. And so it's kind of driven by problems.
RC: And so it’s no coincidence that human history has been littered with car crashes. We’ve been charging into the future at an ever-accelerating pace and all we have to guide us is our rear-view mirror: the strategies and instincts from our evolutionary past, and our biological programming.
That’s why we’ve been so slow to respond to a problem like climate change. Climate change asks us to look out the windscreen and into the future – to anticipate the wall before we run into it - and that’s something which evolution has never been very good at doing.
CARTER PHIPPS: When you start to have a conscious evolutionary process it changes that dynamic; for the first time evolution doesn't have to be, it can be driven by our own sense of the possibilities of the future can be driven not just by a sort of negative feedback but sort of positive feedback too.
RC: And that’s what Daniel Schmactenberger meant when he said that Conscious Evolution obsoletes the need for pain as a driver of evolution. Rather than being driven by the painful lessons of the past we can start to use human consciousness and human ingenuity not to control cultural evolution, but to steer it through the problems we can see coming through the windshield.
CARTER PHIPPS: Evolution has gifted us with some capacity of agency. We don't know how much. Maybe it's not a lot but it doesn’t have to be a lot. It just has to be a little bit and that capacity of agency allows us not to be entirely driven by the past, right? Not to be entirely controlled by the history of our conditioning, by the history of our evolutionary predilections, biologically or even culturally. So that's powerful.
We can start to free ourselves from some of the more obviously destructive habits that come from our biology, and I think that is a powerful and important thing, and no doubt the more we do that, the more we will be, exercising our capacity for Conscious Evolution.
RC: Sometimes when I talk about Conscious Evolution people think I must be talking about genetic engineering or gene editing technology. But Conscious Evolution isn’t about altering human Biology. It’s about transcending it.
Just as sexual reproduction turbocharged biological evolution, Conscious Evolution can do the same thing for human cultural evolution. Just as the transition from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction is biological evolution powered in a new way, the transition from unconscious to Conscious Evolution is cultural evolution powered in a new way.
Conscious Evolution shifts cultural evolution up a gear, so that rather than being pushed from behind by our biological conditioning, it starts to be pulled forwards by our visions of a better future. As Steve McIntosh explains:
STEVE MCINTOSH: I would say that there's both a push and a poll. It seems to me pretty evident that there is a kind of a magnetism of the good that that which can be better is drawing us and persuading us and attracting us in ways that we don't fully understand.
And that's one of the things that characterizes, one of things we could say about, the difference between humans. We may have animal bodies, alright, our DNA may not be that different from a chimpanzee. But cognitively, we have this ability to imagine how things can be better. Animal needs can be relatively satisfied once their animal urges, of surviving and reproducing and hunger and fear, once those needs have been satisfied then they don't imagine a higher level of needs to which they can aspire.
And what humans have manifested the amazing ability to do is that not only can we improve our conditions, but we can improve our definition of improvement itself.
That same hunger for some kind of transcendent meaning, it’s pulling us from the inside, right? That is, the fact that we can always imagine how things can be better. The fact that we have improved our definition of improvement itself, these are evidence that we're not just being driven from below. We're also being pulled from above, if you will pardon the analogy. And the fact that we can feel the pull of a better way, is evidence that we're not just responding to stone age programming.
RC: All that said, overriding our stone age programming is easier said than done. The reward circuits in our brain are powerful and if we’re not conscious they’ll dictate our behaviour and that’s what addictions really are, whether it’s fast food, porn, social media, gambling, drugs, or even video games.
I don’t mean to sound puritanical – all of those things are fine in moderation. Fun even.
But there’s a world of difference from being unconsciously compelled by your biological programming to seek out hits of dopamine and choosing consciously when to enjoy yourself and indulge. The difference between addiction and enjoyment is not how much you engage in the behaviour, it’s how free you are to choose otherwise.
But in order to really do that, in order to free ourselves from our biological and cultural conditioning and to actually become authors of our individual and collective destiny, requires a great deal of awareness. It requires us to wake up.
Carter Phipps describes it as opening our eyes:
CARTER PHIPPS: If you're driving a car but your eyes are closed, you don't have a sense of where you're going, you don't have a very good sense of where you've come from, and you can't possibly really steer. But as we start to realize that we're part of this evolutionary process that we're deeply embedded in this evolutionary process, we start to wake up in some sense to the history of it, to the trajectory of it, to the process of it. And we start to have a sense that we're in the midst of this process, that we're not just studying it from afar or objectively but we're living it. We're actually in the middle of it.
And the experience of recognizing that, of waking up to that is in some sense the experience of opening their eyes in the car. And when we open your eyes, what's the first thing you do? You wake up and you immediately look your eyes forward because you're like oh my god, where am I going? What's happening, where am I going, the car's moving, oh my. And so we're kind of in that process as a culture right now. Oh my god we're moving, we're in this process, we're moving forward, we're in this trajectory. It's like opening our eyes and suddenly realizing we're going forward and then trying to you know put our hands on the steering wheel and think about, how do we steer this car? And for the first time as we start to think about conscious evolution versus unconscious evolution it means we can actually have an impact on that trajectory, an impact on that future have an impact on the direction that car's going. And so it's no longer driven just by running into one wall and then driving the other way and running into the other wall and driving the other way. We can start to anticipate and see forward and actually have some kind of collective impact on where we're headed.
And I think the more we can understand the road that we've been on, the more we'll be able to understand where the road before us is leading and the more we'll be able to hopefully drive that car more skillfully, and as we can drive that car more skillfully, we can have more of an impact on where we're headed and we'll hopefully have less wrecks. That's a huge part of it, just having less wrecks would be tremendously beneficial. Less wrecks in the form of, you know, disastrous events in human history that throw us back.
RC: So how do we know what direction to drive the car in? Well partly, as Carter points out, by increasing our understanding of the road we’ve already been on, increasing our understanding of the evolutionary trajectories that I’ve been describing in this podcast and then extrapolating those trajectories into the future.
In other words, if evolution has steadily increased its scales of cooperation, continually transcending its limitations to become ever more creative and evolvable, then can we imagine pushing those trajectories even further? What’s the most harmonious and creative global society that we can imagine, and can we pull the present forward to meet it?
JOHN STEWART: Conscious Evolution is where humanity or individuals would see the large scale evolutionary processes, see where they're headed to, see the role of humanity and of individuals in driving that process forward and committing to consciously doing so.
RC: That’s John Stewart again, author of the evolutionary manifesto. He uses an interesting analogy to describe the strange responsibility that we all have in this pivotal moment in the evolution of life on earth.
JOHN STEWART: If we imagine ourselves as a cell in a developing chicken embryo. So the embryo develops and produces a chicken. Imagine that you are an aware, conscious cell and imagine that as your awareness grows you start to know more and more about the process that you're embedded in. At first you have no inkling at all that it's directional and that it ends with the hatching of the egg. But as your knowledge expands and so on, you become aware that there are patterns and trajectories in the process in which you are embedded and you eventually realize that they do lead to the production of a chicken, the successful hatching of the egg.
So we're like that to an extent in the sense that humanity is starting to become aware of the large scale evolutionary processes that have formed us and that will shape our evolution in the future, and we're coming to realize that it is like a developmental process. It is headed towards the emergence of a global society, a cooperative and unified and highly evolvable global society.
RC: As we discussed in episode two the formation of ever larger cooperatives throughout the history of evolution has always been driven by competition with an out group. Nothing is more likely to unite two warring tribes than the arrival of an even larger tribe on the other side of the mountain. In this kind of situation, cooperation becomes an imperative: failing to band together could mean getting get wiped out entirely.
Because of this fact, the formation of larger and larger cooperative groups in human history happened automatically. Even a blind process of natural selection with no foresight would inevitably lead in the direction of larger and larger cooperatives for the simple reason that a larger group always has the potential to out-compete a smaller group.
But now that we’ve reached the global scale there is no out-group to compete against, no out-group to push the emergence of global cooperation.
So if the emergence of a global cooperative won’t occur automatically, won’t result from the push of competition with an out-group, the impulse will have to come from our conscious intention.
JOHN STEWART: Imagine as a cell that you discover another critical factor about this developmental process in which you’re embedded. Imagine that you discover that the successful completion of the process, the emergence of a chicken, the hatching of the egg, depends on your actual actions as a cell.
You discover that if you just continue on with your cellular existence, pursuing your cellular goals and so on, embedded in this developmental process. Imagine if you discover that that will not produce the chicken. That for the chicken to result from the process, you actually have to become actively and consciously involved in the developmental process and you have to act in very specific ways if the process is to be successful. Now, startlingly that seems to be the case with humanity and the evolutionary process on this planet.
What an understanding of the evolutionary big picture enables us to see is that humanity has a role, a necessary essential role, in the successful evolution, future evolution of life on this planet. And it enables us to see that individuals equally have an essential role. Unless individuals emerge on this planet who seek to consciously advance the evolutionary process, then the evolutionary process on this planet will fail. We will be a failed evolutionary experiment. We will be a biosphere that fails to give birth to a global entity.
So humans, and humanity as a whole, is increasingly approaching the need to make a fundamental existential decision. Will we commit to advancing the evolutionary process and thereby enabling life on this planet to participate in the future evolution of life in the universe? Or will we turn our back on the evolutionary process, will we turn our back on life? If we just continue to do what we have up to now, if we don't become conscious evolutionaries in sufficient numbers, then we are in effect committing suicide at the level of a global entity.
So without Conscious Evolution, the process on this planet will fail.
RC: That choice is now.
Because a failure to make the transition to Conscious Evolution will put our species in grave danger. In fact, it’s already is putting our species’ in grave danger.
Because without Conscious Evolution we won’t form a global entity, we won’t form a global cooperative. And without global cooperation we are left with nations competing with one another in what Daniel Schmactenberger describes as unconscious rivalrous games, and as we heard in episode two, that means the prospect of climate breakdown or nuclear war is always on the horizon.
Just because we have the potential to become conscious agents of evolution, it doesn’t mean that we definitely will. It’s really down to us, to the choices that we make as a species right now.
DANIEL SCHMACTENBERGER: Either we continue with win/lose game theory and it becomes omni lose/lose, catastrophically. Or, we have to figure out how to have that power not turned against the other power, and figure out what does omni win/win mean, where no one has incentives that are misaligned with the well-being of others in that system that has that much power.
And that’s really the fork in the road we’re at as a species for the first time ever now is, we either figure out what omni win/win means: economically, as a worldview, governance wise, we either figure out what that means, or we continue with win/lose and it becomes omni lose/lose. Which pretty much means we either step up into a radically higher level of quality of life existence with a new kind of collective intelligence, or, we have a catastrophic step down, existential or near existential. But like, in the next not very long time, that’s really the fork in the road.
RC: We are in what some evolutionary theorists describe as an evolutionary bottleneck. The choices that we make now as a species, our decision to either commit to Conscious Evolution or not is the difference between Utopia or Bust.
Because our technological power is now so great and the speed of our evolution so fast that if we continue to evolve unconsciously, blindly, then our next car crash, whether its nuclear war or climate change, might be fatal. Here’s Daniel Schmactenberger again, this time on Charles Eisenstein’s podcast, A New and Ancient story:
DANIEL SCHMACTENBERGER: Our tool making has given us enough power that rivalrous dynamics are unsustainable. We do have the ability to outstrip environments faster than they can reproduce themselves, kill whole species, whatever. And if we are debasing the substrate on which we depend, then we’re self-terminating. The degree of power we have necessitates an evolutionary change, like a fundamental change to the evolutionary process itself, where can’t model ourselves as apex predators anymore. Where, you know, a great white shark can kill one tuna at a time, we can use a supertrawler with a mile long drift net and kill all the tuna, like, you can’t model yourself as an apex predator with that kind of asymmetric technological power.
When you have the ability to destroy whole ecosystems, make whole new environments, genetically engineer new species, you have to model yourself as nature itself, which is the only thing that has had that power previously and recognize that, if nature is moving in the direction of increasing orderly complexity, and we’re powerful enough to affect all of nature, we have to actually be stewards of the increasing orderly complexity of the whole system.
The level of power we have, we’ve kind of got the power of Gods, we have to have the wisdom and love of Gods in order to be able to steward that.
That’s a way of thinking about the transition, where it is unconscious evolution of the whole, right? Natural selection is kind of this evolutionary process that we don’t think of as conscious. Then tool-making is a conscious process, but it’s just parts in rivalrous relationship with each other. The next part is Conscious Evolution of the whole which is really this new epoch phase.
RC: Daniel Schmactenberger talks about having to develop the wisdom and love of Gods, and indeed the story I told at the beginning of this episode conceptualises the evolutionary process as a process of divine self-exploration.
But I want to emphasise that if you’re turned off by the use of the word God then don’t let that turn you away from the idea of Conscious Evolution, because it can be understood in purely rational terms. Indeed, that’s the way evolutionary theorist John Stewart sees it.
Do you think it’s necessary to have a conception of God in order to understand Conscious Evolution?
JOHN STEWART: No, a conception of God or gods or supernatural entities is not necessary. In fact, what I would suggest the evolutionary big picture points to, is that there are three broad phases that sentient organisms will go through on any planet on which they emerge. In the first phase they will not have the capacity to understand the evolutionary process in which they're embedded and that has formed them and that will constrain their future. So they need religions to guide how they behave in ways that are effective in evolutionary terms and that's the evolutionary function of religions, in my view. The sets of injunctions that make up all religions are generally sets injunctions that help organize cooperative tribes, co-operative societies and so on.
Then the second phase that sentient organisms will go through on any planet is that they will develop rationality which will undermine the religious systems that previously guided behaviour. They will undermine them without being able to replace them with wise ways of being that continue to build community and cooperative societies. And that on this planet was the emergence of the European Enlightenment which began the spread of rationality, which undermined religion and resulted in the death of God so to speak.
The disadvantage of that phase, or the restrictions of that phase, is that by undermining religion it also undermines the morality and ethics that produce co-operative societies. So it leads to a stage of chaos and so on.
RC: It also leads, as we’ve discussed in previous episodes, to a difficult phase of meaninglessness.
The disintegration of the mythic religions that began with the historical Enlightenment, was both a huge leap forward, in that it unleashed a tidal wave of scientific discovery, and at the same time left a huge hole in Western culture. Because say what you like about organised religion, they are powerful stories that are incredibly effective at unifying large groups of people and providing them all with meaning and purpose.
And science, for all its explanatory power in telling us how the world works, has almost nothing to say about how we should live in it.
And without a powerful story that can explain who we are and point to our place and purpose in the universe, people suffer.
JOHN STEWART: But then the third phase is when the sentient organisms move out of that. They develop an evolutionary worldview, and that evolutionary worldview enables them to see that cooperation is a key part of evolution, is essential for evolutionary success and they're able to develop without religious underpinnings, without a reliance on supernatural entities, a set of injunctions that lead to evolutionary success and therefore lead to the effective organization of their society and so on. So the evolutionary worldview in my view, in effect, supersedes the need for religion and enables sentient organisms, who understand the evolutionary worldview, to find meaning and purpose and effective guidance in their life without reliance on supernatural entities or religions.
RC: And that’s what Conscious Evolution is. It’s the new story that we’ve been waiting for. A story which can withstand the test of rational scrutiny, and yet at the same time can speak to the deep need we all have for meaning and purpose.
It tells a story of where we’ve come from, who we are and where we might go.
It says loudly and clearly that our choices matter, that the evolutionary process is not just a meaningless random walk, but that it’s actually going somewhere, and humanity can be a part of that if we choose to.
All of us have unique experiences and gifts and so all of us will have different ways of imagining and participating in the creation of the bright future that awaits us.
But above all, your way of contributing to that future in whatever way big or small, will be by doing what you find meaningful!
Whether it’s being of service to others or to the planet, immersing yourself in the creative process or spiritual practice, whenever you lose yourself in flow state, you free yourself from the limitations of your biological and cultural conditioning and you become a channel through which the evolutionary process unfurls.
Cooperation, creativity and transcendence are meaningful because when we engage in those behaviours we stand at the apex of a 13.8 bn year process and we push it forward - we become active conscious participants in the thrust of evolution and that’s why we find them meaningful.
Conscious Evolution is simply the recognition that we are, for better or worse, the self-aware leading edge of a co-creative, evolving process on this planet. And that participating in that process will give your life meaning and purpose.
Now, all that can be understood in totally rational terms. Conscious Evolution is available to you whether you believe in God or not. But if you are a spiritual person then there’s another way to think about Conscious Evolution.
The first evolutionist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck maintained that all life was evolving towards perfection. As Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin said, “In a concrete sense there is not matter and spirit – all that exists is matter becoming spirit.”
Understood in those terms, Conscious Evolution is simply remembering that after all we are that one indivisible Spirit which has embarked on this journey of self-knowledge by incarnating into the material world to feel the music of life more deeply and to rediscover itself through the process of evolution. From the physiosphere to the biosphere to the noosphere and beyond, the meaning of life is simply this – to evolve from simple, limited, isolated forms back towards Spirit’s original unbounded state of freedom.
And meaningfulness is humanity’s compass, for steering the evolutionary process on that path.
I’ll leave you with the beautiful words of Sufi leader Pir Zia Inayat Khan:
PIR ZIA INAYAT KHAN: We must ask ourselves from time to time, some questions. Where am I, in my journey on the spiritual path? Where have I been, where am I now, and in which direction am I going? These seem to me such vital questions. And the question itself is more important, perhaps, than any answer. To keep the question alive. To keep inquiring, to keep looking, witnessing, experiencing. This is crucial for all of us. Not to fall asleep on the journey.
And these questions are important to us, not only as individuals, but also, collectively. These are questions for our species to ask itself. Where have we been? How far have we come? And where are we now? What is the situation on earth? And what is the path forward?
If we do not ask these questions we drift, unconsciously, randomly. Yes, grace still reaches us. But we have lost the opportunity to participate consciously, and purposefully in the destiny of the planet. Participate in the crest of the wave of God’s self-discovery. To take part in the awakening of the very fabric of the earth.
Conscious Evolution is a podcast by Robert Cobbold, with editing from Thomas Glasser, and Sound Design by Mark Pittam.
I’d like to give a special thank you to John Stewart, Steve Mcintosh, and Carter Phipps for speaking to me, and to Daniel Schmactenberger for giving me permission to use his interviews from other podcasts. I’d also like to thank Anthony Adeane and Robbie MacInnes for all their support and guidance in the art of podcasts.
But in particular, I’d like to thank Afro Celt Sound System for letting me use their extraordinary music in the soundtrack. The track you’re listening to right now for example is called Sanctus from their latest album Flight, you can listen to that on Spotify, and if you’ve never listened to them live – go. It’s spectacular.
This podcast is entirely a labour of love to help people find meaning in life. Spreading the word about Conscious Evolution certainly gives my life meaning and purpose, but all the same every interview, every hour of editing, and every cent on advertising has to be paid for out of my own pocket. So if you drew something valuable from listening to this series, and you’d like to hear a second series, then please consider supporting me on Patreon, even if it’s for the smallest amount. You can find a link to my Patreon along with the other episodes, interviews and articles on Conscious Evolution.co.uk