New beginnings

I'd like to start this post with a paper I wrote for my philosophy class, it fills a gap or puzzle I've been trying to put together for about a year.


Science and religion offer explanations interpreting the meaning of life accepted by most people, yet in many cases there is a tendency of bias in favor of one viewpoint over the other. Who is “right”? Is there any way to reconcile their differences? The history of science is closely intertwined with mankind’s unceasing effort towards the lofty goal of discovering truths about our existence. This struggle is humbling for life is short and there is so much to learn—it often leaves me feeling mentally inadequate and unable to find the right words to say. The term ineffable relates to this feeling. It is hard to write on a topic if you don’t know what to say about it. I probably won’t get high marks as it is entirely speculative, but I desired to write on it for about a year now before taking this course.
This paper will compare—and I will expand on— Vedantic writings with other books very similar in nature: on evolution’s relationship to human spirituality. Vedantic texts had a profound influence on the beliefs of many eminent scientists and philosophers, e.g., Albert Einstein, Erwin Schrodinger, Arthur Schopenhauer, and others. The Upanishads and Bhagavad-Gita are the main texts integral in understanding the philosophy of Advaita Vedanta. Deutsch writes, “The central concern of Advaita Vedanta is to establish the oneness of Reality and to lead the human being to a realization of it.” The method of realizing oneness with Reality is established by the individual consciousness itself embodied in the phrase tat tvam asi where, “one begins with individual consciousness (tvam), passes on to universal consciousness (tat), and arrives at the pure consciousness that overcomes the separative reality of both the individual and the universal that constitutes their ground. Tat tvam asi means the affirmation of a common ground, viz., consciousness, to the individual and Brahman. The identity is obtained by stripping away the incompatible or contradictory elements of the “that” and “thou” and thereby arriving at their common elements or basis.” (Deutsch, pg. 49) The Vedantic texts focus on encouraging others to realize the oneness of Reality. Using the expression tat tvam asi the student is taught to associate their tvam, subjective consciousness, and understand its relationship to tat, the universal consciousness, that permanently and wholly envelops their inner being.
For whatever reason we find ourselves “thrown into being,” taking on a myriad of forms as members of Homo sapiens. We assume mammalian bodies as the result of a billion year legacy in the making of evolution on planet Earth. In the vocabulary of Advaita Vedanta, Atman assumes many forms yet its relationship with Brahman is the same throughout, as Brahman remains the common ground of all. The common ground, if I could define it, is essentially spirit. Atman is spirit bounded by time and space but spirit nonetheless and shares this identity with the universal spirit of Brahman.
Life goes on transforming itself as it proceeds from generation to generation. This transformative process was discovered in the 1800s by Charles Darwin and we refer to it today as evolutionary theory. There have been many battles between religious and scientifically inclined folks over the meaning of evolution and oftentimes it is debated that if you believe in one you must disregard the other. I’m not a fan of religious dogma, but I am also not a hardcore atheist. I think evolution is a spiritual process as much as it is a scientific one codified by love. Jesuit Priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said of it, “Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mystical of cosmic forces. Love is the primal and universal psychic energy. Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.”
Albert Einstein wrote, “The most beautiful and most profound experience is the sensation of the mystical. It is the sower of all true science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their primitive forms - this knowledge, this feeling is at the center of true religiousness.” It is in this awe of our relationship with Reality we are humbled. In Reality we assume forms given to us by evolution; the process of evolution has a direction and we play an important role in continuing its trajectory. What exactly do I mean by the term ‘evolutionary trajectory’ and how do we contribute to it?
Max Planck, the German physicist, shares a mystical view and outlines the field we will further examine, "Religion and Natural Science are fighting a joint battle in an incessant, never-relaxing crusade against skepticism, against dogmatism and against superstition, and the rallying cry in these crusades has always been, and always will be: On to God!"
Planck’s rallying cry claims the direction in the process of evolution heads toward a concept of “God.” Many people believe God is something you meet after you die: a nebulous character concerned with your actions on Earth, and by His grace allows the seeker entrance into some other-worldly place called heaven, or eternal condemnation. Another view of God, following more along the lines of Planck’s quote, is a character essentially immanent, residing within creation itself, whose objective is to bring himself out of the woodwork with our cooperation. This sounds like a weird and improbable scenario, yet the relationship between science and religion is more charming, and more revealing of his true character: love, as opposed to fear. The evolutionary-themed emergence of God from creation also sounds heretical, but I do not believe this to be the case. In fact this very idea has been developed further by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in his opus The Phenomenon of Man. The concept of evolution seemed blasphemous, but having studied paleontology and Bergon’s Creative Evolution Teilhard began to adopt the scientific view. The evolution of life becomes a comprehensible phenomenon, “It is an anti-entropic process, running counter to the second law of thermodynamics with its degradation of energy and its tendency to uniformity. With the aid of the sun’s energy, biological evolution marches uphill, producing increased variety and higher degrees of organization. It also produces more varied, more intense, and more highly organized mental activity or awareness.” (Chardin, pg. 27) Connecting the idea of the propensity of evolution’s characteristic of increasing order he formulates a “Law of Complexity/Consciousness” to highlight the ability of evolution to produce forms of higher order as time treads onward.
Man is then, “a summary and synthesis of all the preceding levels of organization. Many factors which had been prepared during the long ages coincided in Man, and a ‘critical transformation’ took place: consciousness became reflexive, conscious of itself. This is the birth of Thought, and while it is in continuity with the general advance of consciousness, it also represents a discontinuity and a leap to a totally new kind of being. The new consciousness, aware of the world, aware of itself, aware of itself in the world, immediately organizes the world around itself.” As order embraces this new mode of being we see that evolution itself changes its protocol, “Evolution reaches a critical point in man, after which it becomes psychosocial. It is consciousness itself, or spirit, which is now evolving. Material heredity is replaced by spiritual heredity, the transmission by education of the ‘acquired characteristics’ of culture… We the evolved, now become the evolvers” (Brutreau, pg. 19-20) Notice the comparison to the recurring theme of this paper: the evolution of spiritual heredity. The trajectory of evolution is primarily material until a critical point is reached. Our task now is to continue the trajectory in another direction, Teilhard refers to the emergence of the noosphere or sphere of thought, using our capacity for thinking to extend ourselves into the next “dimension” of awareness as the “Law of Complexity/Consciousness” carries on.
Science then, as the foundation of organized knowledge, is essentially the spiritual underpinning describing the mechanics of and connectedness of Reality. With the advent of the Internet, we find ourselves increasingly connected with one another, increasing our knowledge and evolving new ideas together. “After this critical point has been passed, evolution takes on a new character: it becomes primarily a psychosocial process, based on the cumulative transmission of experience and its results, and working through an organized system of awareness… As a result, new and often wholly unexpected possibilities have been realized… The conditions of advance are these: global unity of mankind’s noetic organization or system of awareness, but a high degree of variety within that unity; love, with goodwill and full co-operation; personal integration and internal harmony; and increasing knowledge.” (Chardin, pg. 27)
The Internet is the latest step in the increasing complexity of Consciousness that facilitates the global unity of mankind’s noetic organization. The Vedantic theme of Brahman is capable of comparison with Teilhard de Chardin’s Jesuit belief system: “It is Christ, Teilhard affirms, who is the principle of Unity which holds the whole universe together. He is the Shepherd who brings together sheep from many folds. He is the physical, or ontological, center of the universe, and He is, in a way, the ‘soul’ of the evolutionary movement, i.e. He is what ultimately animates it.” (Brutreau. Pg. 32) Substitute Brahman for Christ and the meaning is still essentially the same. Brahman, Christ, Allah, etc. are all expressions attempting to describe the ineffable principle of unity. This principle of unity has a spiritual ground, animates the trajectory of evolutionary movement, and shares its nature with every being united within it.
Teilhard’s conception of evolution is very similar to the Vedantic conception of the oneness of Reality. He even adheres to the theme of oneness within the universe. His overall view of spirituality and evolution and its similarities with Vedantic spirituality is fascinating. Teilhard goes so far as to affirm one of the basic Vedantic tenets, “‘that absolute multiplicity never existed.’ If we adhere to what we can actually observe, we are always in the presence of something which exists; some degrees of unification is always present. And as we climb the scale of evolution, the story of creation becomes ‘the story of the struggle in the universe between the unified multiple and the unorganized multitude.’” (Brutreau, pg. 35)
The Internet serves as a focal point in changing the tempo and character of evolution. As material heredity brings about life and increased levels of consciousness through time, we begin to see the glimmerings of a light at the end of the proverbial tunnel. With the Internet evolution takes on a new character. The multiplicity is increasingly unified in a new phase or mode of being. The tat is then the self-aware aggregate of tvam: “Possessing ourselves of this key to the pattern of reality, we can now turn our faces to the future and speculate on the even greater affinities and unions that must lie before us. Some kind of superconsciousness is to be expected, we say; something like a community of individual reflections uniting themselves ‘in a single unanimous reflection.’ Multiplicity will, of course, be preserved in this final unity; as each person ‘loses himself’ in the great One, he will actually find in it all the perfections of his own individuality. The ultimate state of the world must be ‘a system whose unity coincides with a paroxysm of harmonized complexity.” (Brutreau, pg. 35) The multiplicity as outlined by Teilhard’s evolutionary conception is so closely related to the Vedantic system. The Vedantists described the oneness of Reality, but were not familiar with Darwin and had no access to the Internet; nevertheless they deeply held to the notion of the unity of Reality. Teilhard de Chardin, living hundreds of years after the Vedantists, also held to the belief of an underlying principle of unity in Reality, but also went further by illuminating the possible direction evolution may be headed.
Returning to Max Planck’s quote on the relationship between Religion and Natural Science and looking at evolution in this light, we might say that “God” is what emerges from the collective consciousness, the united aggregate of tvam, in a global self-aware super consciousness. Evolution is a spiritual process aiming at the fulfillment of Christ’s request, “‘that they all may be one, even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us.’ This source of perfection, then, the union with Divinity which appears so exceptional when seen incarnate in human society, should, by our principle, actually be the universal characteristic (in graduated degrees) of all being… In this view the cosmos is immediately revealed as an evolution toward Divinity.” (Brutreau, pg. 33) This evolution toward Divinity is analogous to Planck’s rallying cry. To illustrate the relationship, Teilhard believes: “Evolution is a tremendous undertaking of the incorporation of physical matter into humanity and of humanity into Christ and therefore into God.” (Brutreau, pg. 33)
This fascinating discussion and its relationship with the meaning behind Planck’s quote is certainly an alternative and less held view of the evolutionary process. Skeptics engender a culture of criticism and are generally suspicious of claims involving God. The scientific method and basic applications of Occam’s razor discourages the introduction of entities multiplied unnecessarily. The speculative nature of this paper is only meant to be a personal project highlighting the relationship between Advaita Vedanta and the writings of and about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard had a lot to say about science and religion and did not see the
two as antithetical, but instead supportive of one another. As a Jesuit priest and paleontologist he saw both sides of the aisle had something meaningful to contribute to the story of life. The development of the Internet is a recent phenomenon; Teilhard predicted its emergence using the trajectory of the evolution of life and its relationship with our capacity for thought, calling this thought-activity of humans the noosphere. This ability to think among the human species gave Teilhard the idea that in the future a network of interconnected thinking beings sharing the results and contents of their experience: knowledge, art, music, etc.
Is the information age the beginning of Teilhard’s predicted superconsciousness? The idea that “a community of individual reflections uniting themselves ‘in a single unanimous reflection’” doesn’t seem farfetched as it would have fifty or a hundred years ago. The combination of globalization and changes stemming from the Internet reveal a global noetic organization derived from mankind’s scientific efforts.
If Advaita Vedanta’s relationship to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s writings are judged by their similarity we find that both hold to the notion of the oneness of Reality. Teilhard, living hundreds of years after the Vedantins, expanded on that idea and inferred from the history of evolution the emergence of the Internet. This arising “superconsciousness” from within the noosphere becomes more apparent to me with each passing day but predicting what happens from here is a mystery.


I think it's safe to say I hardly know what my future will be like. We can dream and we can plan all we want. Improve your lot: play the hand you've been dealt. Although my mind still wanders off track at times when I need it most, I try to make decisions using a rough cost-benefit analysis. There isn't much math involved, but the objective I aim for is to redirect my energies and turn something previously harmful into something good. Think of yourself entering a positive feedback loop, where the small daily gains accumulate into something substantial. Find whatever you want to change and go for it. Every day we're evolving with the world and technology around us. I still find it hard to pick the right words to say in a conversation, oftentimes I feel incredibly inadequate, but every new day is an opportunity to prove myself wrong. Here I am at twenty-two with my whole life ahead of me. I'd like to make an imaginary toast coinciding with the arrival of the new year: to new beginnings.