Monthly Archives: July 2021

July 29, 2021 – The Psychological and Religious Grounds of Happiness

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Last Week

For the last several weeks we have been addressing human happiness from the perspectives of materiality, evolution, and spirituality.  This week we will look at a fourth and fifth facet, those of psychology and religion.

The Psychological Facet of Happiness

As we addressed the idea of meditation as a search for the ‘cosmic spark’ that lies at the core of each product of evolution, and therefore at the core of ‘personness’, we recognized the practice of psychology as a science-based approach to facilitating this search.

Specifically, we noted the approach taken by Dr. Carl Rogers  (September 10) as he introduced an approach to this facilitation in which the ‘therapist’ acted as a guide to the ‘client’ in undergoing such a search.  We listed many of the outcomes that Rogers records in such ‘facilitations’ and how they are examples of the results of the searching.  In all cases, Rogers records a path from ‘less whole’ to ‘more whole’.

As nearly all religions and most psychological schools assert, such a journey, if successful, will result in an increased degree of ‘happiness’.

Thus, Rogers’ articulation of the journey’s discrete steps and distinct outcomes offers an articulation of the concept of happiness itself.

As we saw, Rogers starts with a basic belief that humans are capable of happiness, and that the client can

“… reorganize himself at both the conscious and deeper levels of his personality in such a manner as to cope with life more constructively, more intelligently, and in a more socialized as well as a more satisfying way”.

   This potential to ‘reorganize himself’ in such a way as to ‘cope with life’ in a ‘more satisfying way’ is clearly one of the essentials of human happiness.  In the actualizing of this potential, we begin to move from the position that happiness ‘comes from without’ and that we are dependent on circumstances for our happiness, to the position that happiness can indeed result from our readiness to ‘reorganize ourselves’. We can become responsible for our own happiness.

Rogers goes on to list the characteristics of such reorganized life:

–more integrated hence more effective

–more realistic view of self

– stronger sense if valuation of self

– increasing self-confidence

–more openness to experience, less denial or repression

–more accepting of others, seeing others as more similar

-clearer in communication

-more responsible for actions

-less defensive and anxious

   He summarizes the characteristics of such a person:

– Increasingly open to personal experience, permitting less defensiveness

– Increasingly “existential”; living more fully in each moment, in touch with experiences and feelings

– Increasingly trusting of his own organism, able to trust those feelings and experiences

– Increasingly able to function more completely

   In Rogers we see an ‘articulation of happiness’: objective measures of the presence of maturity that is possible in human life and surely constitute many of the dimensions possible in human happiness.

The Religious Articulation of Happiness

All religions in some way address ‘how we should be if we would become what we can be’.  Many stress the necessity to undergo ‘diminishments’ in ‘this life’ in order qualify for ’reimbursement’ in ‘the next’, which suggests that, as Harari does, we should not expect much in the way of human happiness.  Others insist that real happiness in this life consists of disassociation with society so that an ecstatic union can be consummated with the divine.  Still others suggest that since life is such an unfair proposition, all that is left is resignation.  Christianity, put in the context of Jewish tradition, can be seen to reflect most of these positions.

But not in all its manifestations.
The New Testament, with its insistence on the potential of intimacy with the ‘ground of being’, contains an articulation of what can happen in the human person when they become aware of the ‘indwelling’ of ‘the spirit’.

For the most part, as Christian theology has evolved, this has suggested a reward ‘in this world’ for ‘faith’.  From the vantage point of Blondel, and then Teilhard, the evolutionary approach to understanding makes this facet of belief, as it makes many others, ripe for reinterpretation.

The ‘Fruit’ of the Cosmic Spark

The ‘Fruit of the Spirit’ is Paul’s term that identifies nine attributes of a person or community living ‘in accord with the Holy Spirit’.  Chapter 5 of Paul’s Epistle to the Galatians lists them:

“But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.”

   Reinterpreting the concept of the ‘Spirit’ involves understanding ‘spirit’ in terms of the secular vein of energy that rises in us as a manifestation of the universal energy of evolution.  As we saw three weeks ago, Teilhard understands spirituality as

“…as neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’.”

    Thus ‘spirituality’ can be seen, as Paul Davies puts it, as the ‘software’ by which the ‘hardware’ of matter increases in complexity over time.

This is the ‘hermeneutic’ which we have used throughout to ‘reinterpret’ the tenets of Western religion as we approach the ‘filtering’ of it in search of how this ‘software’ can be seen to work in our lives.

From this vantage point, we can reinterpret Paul’s ‘Spirit’ as simply that which lifts us into ‘a higher state’ as we evolve.

With this in mind, among our several attempts to objectively quantify the attributes of a ‘full’ or complete human life, such characteristics seem high on the list.

Love –  We have addressed the attribute of love several times, noting the significant difference between the traditional understanding of it as the emotion by which we are attracted to each other and Teilhard’s insight that it is a manifestation of the universal evolutive energy by which things become more complex, and hence more united over time in such a way as they become more complete.  By participating in love we become more complete, more whole.  As Teilhard succinctly puts it

“Fuller being from closer union, and closer union from fuller being.”

Peace –  It is hard to imagine something more conducive to happiness than peacefulness.  Such a state can arise in us when we realize that our efforts to grow more complete are assured by a universal energy which rises unbidden and unearned within us.  God, as Blondel understood ‘Him’, is on our side. Life, as it is offered to us as a gift, is guaranteed to be open to our strivings, and is welcoming to our labors.  As the Ground of Being is uncovered as our own personal ground of existence, it is understood more as father than as fate.

Patience – Patience becomes more than long-suffering, teeth gritting endurance necessary for ‘salvation’, but the natural acceptance of what cannot be changed in light of Teilhard’s “..current to the open sea” on which we are carried when we ‘…set our sails to the winds of life.”

Recognition of the Cosmic Spark within us, the ‘gifted’ nature of it, and confidence in where it is taking us, can instill a patience with the vagaries of life that was would have been previously considered to be naive.  It is the state that can be experienced as we “awaken to the coming of more-being on the horizon” (John Haught).

Kindness – As an essential building block of both society and personal relationships, kindness is prescribed by nearly every religion in their variations of the ‘Golden Rule’.  Beyond this prescription is the natural emergence of kindness as a recognition that not only is the Cosmic Spark active in ourselves, but in others as well.  Treating others as we ourselves would be treated requires us to be aware of how our own Cosmic Spark is the essence of being by which we all reflect Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’.

Johan Norberg attributes the exponential increase of human welfare that he documents in his book, “Progress” to the increased value of the human and the improvement of human relationships which underpins it.  Kindness is one of the building blocks to the effectiveness of relationships.

Goodness –  Goodness, of course, is that tricky concept which underlays all the ‘fruits’ of Paul.  In Paul, as echoed by Teilhard, that which is ‘good’ is simply that which moves us ahead, both as individuals and members of our societies.  If we are to have ‘abundance’ of life, whatever contributes to such abundance is ‘good’.

Faithfulness – As we saw in our look at the Theological Virtues, faith is much more than intellectual and emotional adherence to doctrines or dogmas as criteria for entry into ‘the next life’.  Faith has an ontological character by which we understand ourselves to be caught up in a ‘process’ which lifts us from the past and prepares us for a future that, while it might be unknown, is nevertheless fully manageable.

Gentleness – As a mirror to ‘goodness’, ‘gentleness’, once we have become aware of the Cosmic Spark not only in ourselves but in all others, becomes the only authentic way of relating to others.

Self-Control – Self-control acknowledges that while we might be caught up in a process by which we become what it is possible to become, this process is dependent upon our ability and willingness to choose.  Being carried by Teilhard’s ‘current towards the open sea’ (‘Patience’, above) still requires us to develop the skills of ‘sail setting’ and ‘wind reading’.  The instinctual stimuli of the reptilian and limbic brains do not dissipate as we grow, but the skill of our neocortex brains to modulate them must be judiciously developed.

Next Week

This week we took a second look at how traditional Western religious insights into human life can be extracted from their traditional religious vernacular and understood in a secular context.  This week, just as we saw last week, those insights proposed by Paul are easily placed in a secular evolutionary context when seen from the perspective of Teilhard’s evolutionary world view.

This, of course, is another example of Blondel’s approach to religion: in the light of evolution, religious tenets can be reinterpreted in terms of human life.  Or, as John Haught puts it

“…every aspect of religion gains new meaning and importance once we link it to the new scientific story of an unfinished universe.”

This permits us to move, as John Haught suggests, from the “nonnatural mode of causation” fostered by traditional religion to one which not only is “..linked..to the scientific story” but retains traditional religion’s emphasis on the human person (as understood by Thomas Jefferson).  This emphasis can, in turn, sharpen the focus with which the human person is treated by traditional science.

Next week we will sum up our exploration of the human attribute of ‘happiness’.

July 22, 2021 – Articulating the ‘Spiritual’ Basis of the Ground of Happiness

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Becoming aware of the aspects of spirituality at work in our lives

Today’s Post

Last week we traced the ‘spiritual ground of happiness’ to the ‘terrain of synergy’ between science and religion.  We saw that at the center of this terrain is the concept of ‘increasing complexity’ in evolution which opens the door to an overlap between science and religion and hence points the way to a truly integrated mode of human existence.

We saw again how Yuval Harari’s insight that our human capacities can alienate us from our evolutionary legacy connection with our environment   But we also recognized that, contrary to his dystopian forecast, as we become more integrated and more whole in our individual lives and in our collective societies, we can come to recognize our true connection to the wellsprings of the cosmos.  Or, as Teilhard puts it:

“..I doubt that whether there is a more decisive moment for a thinking being than when the scales fall from his eyes and he discovers that he is not an isolated unit lost in the cosmic solitudes and realizes that a universal will to live converges and is made human in him.”

This week we will look further into Teilhard’s insights into the structure of the cosmos in such a way as to justify such strong confidence.

Teilhard’s Simple Picture of Cosmic Evolution

As we saw in our look at the structure of cosmic evolution (November, 2018), Teilhard envisions evolution proceeding throughout the cosmos from the ‘big bang’ in the form of a ‘convergent spiral’.  As the products of evolution replicate themselves through joining and producing ‘offspring’ (eg atoms from groupings of electrons), they also experience a ‘rise’ in their complexity.  This increase in complexity endows future such products with an increase in their potential to unite and thereby increasing the potential for further increases in complexity.

This increased potential of each product endows it with a greater capability for union, resulting in a spiral which ‘tightens’ as it ‘rises’.  The resultant increased potential is a third agent whose direction is ‘inward’, hence the decreasing diameter of the spiral: its ‘convergence’.  From this simple model, Teilhard envisions that as these products become more complex as they rise, this complexity makes them more ‘resonant’ to the ‘converging’ nature of the ‘axis of evolution’.  To Teilhard, a characteristic of a more evolved product can be seen in its increased sensitivity to the universal energy of evolution.

More evolved products of evolution evolve more quickly.

With these three forces, forward, upward and inward, applying as they do to every product of evolution in every age of the universe, Teilhard sketches the structure of cosmic evolution as it moves forward in the direction of increased complexity.

Teilhard also notes that not only does the diameter of the spiral decrease with time, it decreases ‘exponentially’.   The rate of convergence increases over time.  It takes some eight billion years for complex molecules to emerge from aggregates of atoms, but only five billion years for brains to emerge, then less than one billion years for brains to become aware of themselves.

This is not, of course, religious teaching in any form.  It is simply a way of empirically looking at scientifically accumulated data in a different way.  The data by which the history of evolution is categorized becomes much more straightforward when the ‘characteristic of complexity’ is recognized, and as we have seen, ultimately opens the door to science’s addressing of the human person.

Once the phenomenon of ‘increasing complexity’ is recognized in its universal context, all things in the cosmos become both inextricably linked and thus increasingly intelligible.  Humans therefore become a valid subject of science once their place in the universal ‘hierarchy of being’ is recognized.

That said, however, the problem still obtains that once the threshold of ‘consciousness aware of itself’ is crossed, it becomes difficult to study human evolution outside the conventional Darwinist paradigm of ‘Natural Selection”, which reduces humans to simple molecular activities under the influence of such things as ‘chance’ and ‘survival’.

Teilhard’s unique model of the ‘convergent spiral’ overcomes this barrier.  His three ‘vectors’ of ‘forward’, ‘upward’ and ‘inward’ apply equally to every stage of universal evolution and to every new state of energy and matter that results from it.

Science has little difficulty understanding the transition from pure energy (at the ‘big bang)’ through the evolution of complex molecules, as the ‘Standard Theory’ of Physics outlines.  The transition to the cell, and the latter (and quicker) transition to consciousness are more difficult, and by the time we get to ‘consciousness aware of itself’, all bets are off.  This is the main reason why the last stage is so poorly addressed by science.  Humans are either ‘epi-phenomenon’ or simply the random result of pure chance; either way they outside the scope of scientific enquiry as such.

If science avoids addressing the human phenomenon, how can we apply Teilhard’s tri-vector conception of evolution to its rise through the human?

How Does Human Evolution Reflect the Evolutional Spiral?

If we believe that the universe is evolving along Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’, then we should be able to find examples of how they are playing out in human history.  As we have seen, science so far has been of little help.

In Early May 2019 we took an extensive look at how this spiral can be seen at work in the human person.  Our personal (and cultural) evolution can hence be seen as a continuation of universal evolution as we (in Teilhard’s terms)

“…continually find new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space” by “a rise in interiority and liberty within a whole made up of reflective particles that are now more harmoniously interrelated.”

   High minded words indeed.  Can we find examples?  Consider Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, which, in implicit agreement with Teilhard, does indeed offer both insight as well as articulation of these activities.

We first looked at Norberg’s ‘articulations of the noosphere’ in Chapter 4, which clearly and objectively show an exponential increase in human welfare (a measure of human evolution) since 1850, and in which he cites many examples of Teilhard’s

“continual find(ing of) new ways of arranging (our) elements in the way that is most economical of energy and space”

  In all nine of the areas of such ‘arrangements’, he cites the Western value of human freedom as the underlying causality.

His findings illustrate the action of Teilhard’s three ‘vectors’ of the spiral:

–          Fruitful Unity: Each step of the exponential increase described by Norberg is precipitated by an action of human collective insight, a sharp and clear example of improved human relationships as the locus of the energy of evolution manifesting itself in the human.  Unity is the first vector: that which connects the products of evolution to move them ‘forward’.

–       Resulting complexity: As a result of each step, the complexity of society can be seen to increase in terms of more efficient organization, the reduction of human ills such as wars, famine and disease, and increased human lifespan.  Increasing complexity is the second vector, the ‘upward’ component.

  • Increasing response to the agency of universal complexification: Through the increases in education and communication since 1850, each new step of evolution provides a stage for the next as individual persons become better educated at the same time that collective society is raised to the next level.  In such results can be seen the action of the ‘inward’ component.

These three ‘vectors’ of human evolution, as they appear in our personal evolution, are a locus for human happiness.  In the alignment of our lives along the universal ‘axis of evolution’, we experience

  • more complete and therefore increasingly satisfactory relationships
  • which contribute to our personal growth
  • which in turns enables us to deepen our relationships

Once again, we are reminded of Teilhard’s deep insight that

“Fuller being comes from closer union.  Closer union comes from fuller being”

The Next Post

This week we continued our exploration of the ‘spiritual’ ground of happiness, noting that this ‘ground’ is located within the ‘terrain of synergy’.  Once we begin to sense that the ‘ground of being’ is ‘on our side’, it becomes possible to build a level of confidence in the process of cosmic evolution as it rises through ourselves.

Having seen a clearer picture of this ‘terrain of synergy’ and its potential for a satisfaction with life that is grounded in a clear-headed, secular perspective, we can take our exploration of it yet a little further.  Next week we will outline the dimensions of the ‘terrain of synergy’, and how it can be seen as the center-ground for the two traditional ways of ‘telling the cosmic story’.

July 15, 2021 – Exploring the ‘Spiritual’ Ground of Happiness

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How can ‘spirituality’ help us to become happier?

Today’s Post

Last week we began a look at the third facet of the subject of ‘happiness’, this time from the perspective of ‘spirituality’.  We noted that from this perspective, we are using this term to refer to what Teilhard called ‘the sap of the axis of evolution’: the agency which increases complexity over time.  This distinguishes his use of the term from traditional religious terminology that refers to such things as ‘supernatural’.

In our use of it, we are referring to that which is active in our lives, here and now.   Paraphrasing Patricia Albere, author of Evolutionary Relationships, it is the latest evolutionary activity in the long history of rising universal complexity, the recognition of the evolutionary forces that are ready to “optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity” if we but ‘listen”.

This week we will explore this a bit further.

The Spiritual Ground of Happiness and the Terrain of Synergy

On July 11, we took a look at this ‘Terrain of Synergy’ as the common ground between science and religion, quite small for centuries but as writers such as Jonathan Sacks, Teilhard, Richard Rohr, John Haught and Paul Davies insist, can be seen today as much larger than commonly thought.

The expansion of this ground is one of the consequences of moving the center of understanding of evolution from the biological, Earth-centric scope of the Darwinists to the universal, all-encompassing vision sought by both scientists and religionists today.  Not only does the current scope of evolution expand in this enterprise, but the insight into how science and religion can contribute to a better understanding of the human condition becomes clearer.  As Brian Swimme, Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, sees it, the study of ‘cosmology’ is focused on such expansion.

“The sciences will just separate the human off and focus on the physical aspects of the universe and the religious traditions will shy away from the universe because that’s reserved for science. So cosmology is an attempt to deal with the whole and the nature of the human in that.”

In exploring this ‘terrain of synergy’ we are really exploring the nature of existence, an integrated understanding of the universe, its unfolding, and if it is to be truly ‘cosmological’, our part in it.

Such understanding is the starting place for situating ourselves into the true context of evolution, which is the same thing as understanding how we fit into the fourteen or so billion years of the rise of complexity: Teilhard’s ‘axis of evolution’.

As we have seen, such placement also recognizes the consequence of failing to do so, as was recognized by Yuval Harari in his suggestion that we have broken the bond that our ancestors enjoyed with their environment and have hence doomed ourselves to a future of unhappiness leading to a quick extinction.  While Harari fails to recognize the recent (by evolutionary standards) trend towards increased human welfare outlined by Johan Norberg (19 July 2018), our current levels of anxiety indicate that at the personal level, we still have a long way to go.

Happiness and the Terrain of Synergy

How can recognition of the ‘terrain of synergy’ be a factor in human happiness?

Consider that understanding the ‘axis of evolution’, the universe’s tendency to increase complexity over time, offers science a way to begin to address the human person on the one hand, and on the other a way for religion to understand the workings of the ‘Ground of Being’ in universal evolution.

Quantification of complexity, therefore, is a filter through which western religious teachings can be strained to remove their supernatural and magical content.  By the same token, defining it can extend the more advanced subjects of science, such as quantum physics, into the study of the human person.

The epicenter of the ‘terrain of synergy’ is therefore the common ground between science and religion.  It is the recognition that the human person is the latest manifestation of the ‘complexification’ of the ‘stuff of the universe’: evolution become aware of itself.  This perspective recognizes both the increase in complexity acknowledged (at least tacitly) by science and the importance of the human person in the scheme of things asserted by Western religion.   This perspective emerges when we come at the understanding of the cosmos from science’s recognition that the ‘axis of universal evolution’ is ‘complexification’ and from religion’s intuition that God exists as the underlying agent of such ‘complexification’.

The journey to such an integrated perception is outlined by Teilhard’s description of his own vision of his roots in the ‘axis of evolution’.

Such ‘rootedness’ is essential to our recognition of the part we play in the cosmic sweep of evolution.  And this recognition is at the core of Patricia Albere’s assertion that we must become aware of the “evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”.

Such recognition is echoed by Teilhard as he describes his experience of the two hands of God:

“..the one which holds us so firmly that it is merged, in us, with the sources of life, and the other whose embrace is so wide that, at its slightest pressure, all the spheres of the universe respond harmoniously together.”

   This echoes one of Maurice Blondel’s ‘reinterpretations’ of Western religion’s understanding of God:

“- that God is Father means that human life is oriented towards a gracious future- God is ‘on our side’ “

   To a person who believes that they are being held “In God’s hand”, and that the ground of being “is on their side” the possibility of happiness moves from being a possibility to being a probability.

The Next Post

This week we continued our exploration of the ‘spiritual’ ground of happiness, noting that this ‘ground’ can be seen in the idea of the ‘terrain of synergy’.  Once we begin to sense that the ‘ground of being’ is ‘on our side’, it becomes possible to build a level of confidence in the process of cosmic evolution as it rises through ourselves.

Having seen a clearer picture of this ‘terrain of synergy’ and its potential for a satisfaction with life that is grounded in a clear-headed, secular perspective, we can take our exploration of it a little further.  Next week we will look a little deeper into the structure of this ‘terrain of synergy’ for some signposts to such exploration.

July 8, 2021 – The ‘Spiritual’ Ground of Happiness

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How Can a Secular’ Spirituality’ Enhance Human Happiness?
Today’s Post

Last week we took a second look at the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of universal evolution.  We saw how Yuval Harari, in his book, Sapiens, suggested that we have “dug our own grave’’ due to our uniquely evolved human characteristic of ‘consciousness aware of itself’, and because of this, our potential for true happiness is accordingly diminished.  With this speculation, Harari sees the appearance of human consciousness as an ‘evolutionary mistake’, a mistake for which we must pay with an unavoidable existential unhappiness.

In looking at this further, we agreed that humans have indeed departed from the evolutionary ‘accommodation with environment’ delivered by ‘Natural Selection’ and assured by the instincts in our evolutionary predecessors.   Perhaps our current state is indeed a result of this discontinuity, but as we saw, not necessarily the whole picture.

While disagreeing with Harari’s dystopic conclusion, we saw the merit in acknowledging that our species has nonetheless broken the instinctual bond enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors and that this breach is indeed a source of the ‘pain of our evolutionary convergence’.  But when looking at evolution from Teilhard’s perspective, such pain is not unexpected in the ‘rise of complexity’ embedded in the sap of the tree of evolution.  From his perspective, all human advances, such as those documented in Johan Norberg’s book, “Progress”, come about due to discomfort with the ‘status quo’.  Any perfect, static serene accommodation with our environment would require absolute perfection of both ourselves and this environment.  Even the simplest scientific understanding of reality shows this to be a fantasy in a universe whose most common feature is ‘constant change’.

Understanding the dynamic nature of existence, Patricia Albere, author of Evolutionary Relationships, sees the long history of rising universal complexity as suggesting that we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”.  To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

This week we will look at the third facet of happiness, a look which involves such ‘paying of attention’.  In doing so we will begin a look at happiness from the perspective of ‘spirituality.’

What is ‘Spirituality’?

As Teilhard addressed ‘spirituality’, the term is framed with apostrophes in recognition of the freight that this term carries with its religious overtones of ‘the supernatural’.  It can reflect the eons of religious teaching which seemed to widen the gap between the ‘material’ lives we live and the ideal ‘spiritual’ life which lies far above us, attainable only in a ‘next’ life in which we are compensated for the pain experienced in this one.

A problem arises when we try to address the underlying agency of evolution, that which causes the universe to become more complex over time.  What term do we use to discuss it?  Teilhard used the term ‘complexification’, which certainly is accurate, but he also uses the term ‘spiritual’ as well.  From his point of view, ‘spiritual’ simply refers to the agency which is present in all matter and causes it, over time, to organize itself into ever more complex arrangements.  Paul Davies refers to it as the ‘software’ embedded in the ‘hardware’ of matter.  Other scientists refer to it as simply the quanta of ‘information’ in every particle of matter by which it is ushered into connections which result in more complex configurations.  An example of such an action can be seen in how the information contained in DNA guides RNA to produce the proteins necessary for growth of the cell.  Without such presence in all things, evolution would be unable to proceed and simply replicate itself endlessly at a static level of complexity. To Teilhard, therefore, ‘spiritual’ is ‘natural’, but only if the term ‘natural’ is understood in its widest, most universal, context.

We have seen several times how this concept can be found apart from religion.  We saw on July 11 how Paul Davies understands universal evolution, including its extension into human life, to be underscored by increasing complexity.

But a less likely proponent of this position is Richard Dawkins, famous atheistic evolutionary biologist. Dawkins, in his anti-religious book, “The God Delusion” nonetheless states that the idea of a “first cause of everything” which was the “basis for a process which eventually raised the world as we know it into its present complex existence” was entirely viable.  In the next breath, he insists that “we must very explicitly divest it of all the baggage that the word ‘God’ carries in the minds of most religious believers.”  He is suggesting that there is clearly something afoot in universal evolution, but that it must be addressed from a secular perspective if we want to make sense of it.

As we have seen previously, Teilhard would have agreed at this level.  His take on spirituality also eschewed terms like ‘supernatural’, as he understood as did Dawkins, such ‘process’ to lie in the plane of natural existence.

“…spirit is neither super-imposed nor accessory to the cosmos, but that it quite simply represents the higher state assumed in and around us by the primal and indefinable thing that we call, for want of a better name, the ‘stuff of the universe’.  Nothing more; and also nothing less.  Spirit is neither a meta- nor an epi- phenomenon, it is the phenomenon.”

Richard Dawkins offers yet another empirical insight into the issue of ‘information’ in human evolution.  Like Teilhard, he recognizes the difference between evolution in society and as understood as ‘Natural Selection’ by biology.  In his book, “The Selfish Gene’, he proposes that evolution continues through human society by way of ‘memes’, packets of cultural information, as the cultural parallel to biological genes.  Such ‘memes’ are echoed in Teilhard’s concept of the ‘noosphere’, which is the body of human thoughts, ideas and inventions which accumulate in human lore, rituals, books, schools and networks over time, and is thus ‘spiritual’ (by his definition)in nature.

By identifying spirit as phenomenal and affirming its existence neither outside (epi) nor above (meta) nature, Teilhard is referring to science’s observation that the universe increases in complexity over the course of its evolution.  This observation assumes that there is an agency, folded into matter, which assures the increase in complexity that marks every evolutionary step from energy to matter, simple matter to quarks, quarks to protons, protons to atoms to molecules to complex molecules to cells to neurons to brains to consciousness.  As Jonathan Sacks observes, in each step the new evolutionary products display a collective complexity that is a property of the new product, not just aggregated properties of the individual products that comprise them.

Thus ‘spirituality’ is simply a word which refers to this tendency of ‘the stuff of the universe’ to ‘complexify over time’.  As Teilhard goes on to say

“Spirituality is not a recent accident, arbitrarily or fortuitously imposed on the edifice of the world around us, it is a deeply rooted phenomenon, the traces of which we can follow with certainty backwards as far as the eye can reach.   The phenomenon of spirit is not therefore a sort of brief flash in the night; it reveals a gradual and systematic passage from the unconscious to the conscious, and from the conscious to the self-conscious.”

   Therefore, the acknowledgement of the existence of this ‘cosmic spark’ in all things offers us a perspective on how our species fits into the sweep of evolution, even if it does so in a way different from the environmental ‘accommodation’ enjoyed by our predecessors.  If, as Patricia Albere asserts, the ‘forces of evolution’ are such that they can, as they have done for fourteen billions of years, ‘optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity’ if we only begin to ‘listen’, then listening to the ‘voice’ of this ‘cosmic spark’ as it exists in our lives can permit human life to be more harmoniously intertwined with our environment.

By Teilhard’s definition, therefore, spirituality is indeed a third ‘ground of happiness’.

The Next Post

This week we began a look at the third facet of the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of ‘spirituality’.  However, we took Teilhard’s understanding of this equally slippery term from his recognition of the agency of universal ‘complexification’.  Given this understanding of ‘spirituality’ as the term which refers to the underlying cause of the universal phenomenon of ‘complexification’, this suggests that some measure of our personal happiness is dependent on how well we listen to the ‘cosmic spark’ as it exists in each of us.  Patricia Albere suggests that such ‘listening’ can open us to the ‘optimization that can happen in our lives’.  In simpler terms, we can trust the agency of universal evolution as it is in work in ourselves.  But as Albere recons, we must  first learn to ‘listen’ to it.

“Easier said than done”, goes the old adage.  Humans may now represent the most advanced stage of evolution so far on this planet, but where in this stage can be found first the methods of finding this spark so that we can indeed ‘listen’, and then how it is possible to make sense of what we hear and put it to use in life?  Any success in either of these endeavors is certain to bring us into increased ‘accommodation’ with our environment (better aligned with evolution), and hence closer to our goal of ‘thinking with the whole brain’.

Next week we will take another step in this exploration of ‘the spiritual’ facet of happiness, this time exploring our accumulated lore of such searching and deciding.

 

July 1, 2021 – The Evolutionary Ground of Happiness

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How Can Fitting The Human Person Into Evolution Highlight The Potential For Happiness?

Today’s Post

Last week we took a broad overview of the subject of ‘happiness’ and noting its vagueness, began to place it into Teilhard’s context of ‘universal evolution’.   In our overview last week, we looked at several ‘material’ aspects from the viewpoints of science (such as surveys of this highly subjective topic as well as genetic influences) and saw that while all these searches for the ‘seat of happiness’ provide insights, the ‘bottom line’ still evades us.

This week we will look at human happiness from the second viewpoint, that of cosmic evolution.

If, as we have maintained throughout this blog,

  • Teilhard’s insight that the underlying manifestation of universal evolution, from the ‘big bang’ to the present can be seen in the increase of complexity,
  • and this increase of complexity can be measured by the increase of consciousness which leads to the human person
  • then, the fourteen or so billions of years of universal evolution of which we are products must be still somehow active in our own personal and social evolution.

Whatever it is that has been at work in the rise of complexity of the ‘stuff of the universe’ it must be active in each of its products.  As one of these products, it must therefore be active in us.  If it is, it can be trusted to continue in us, and our ‘happiness’ is in some way related to it.

Teilhard summarizes universal evolution as

“Fuller being in closer union and closer union from fuller being.”

The attribute of ‘fuller being’ itself implies ‘better fit’, and in this the evolutionary aspect of happiness lies.

Can Humans, As an Evolved Species, Ever be Happy?

If, as Teilhard insists, we are to understand our evolution as persons and as society from the context of universal evolution, our happiness, or at least our potential for happiness, must be understood in this way as well.  How can our potential for happiness be understood in such an evolutionary context?

Paraphrasing Patricia Albere, author of “Evolutionary Relationship”, this long history of rising complexity suggests that, as its latest product, we have only to allow ourselves to be “lifted by the evolutionary forces that are ready to optimize what can happen in our lives and in humanity”.  To do this, “we only have to begin to pay attention”.

Yuval Harari, in his book, “Sapiens”, suggests a less optimistic outcome.  From his perspective, humans have not only evolved much faster than their environment but are ruining the environment from which we are becoming increasingly estranged.  He notes that our predecessor species enjoyed long periods of florescence, on the order of several millions of years, because their pace of evolution matched the pace of the evolution of their environment.  This ‘fit’ with their environment insured, as he sees it, a continuing and long lasting ‘fruitful accommodation’ between species and their environments; an accommodation that humans have lost in their ongoing estrangement.  The result, in his opinion, is the existential unease that makes it almost impossible for us to be ‘happy’ and the resulting unhappiness will erode our survival instincts, eventually resulting in an untimely extinction.

He notes that in our quest to assure our continued evolution, we are becoming more and more dependent upon technology.  He sees the resulting explosion of technology becoming more damaging to the environment on the one hand, and on the other eroding our natural sense of our selves.

Where Teilhard saw a ‘convergent spiral’ raising us to higher levels of complexity and ‘fuller being’, Harari sees our increasing reliance on technology as a ‘divergent’ factor which will reduce our sense of ourselves and lead to ‘lesser being’.  With humans, he suggests, ‘evolution’ will lead to ‘devolution’.

In mapping our estrangement from nature, he notes that every step humanity has taken from our animal predecessors’ hunter-gatherer state has come with increased emotional discomfort and dissatisfaction.  As populations increased, culture became sedentary, farms became necessary, requiring laborers, storage buildings, roads and trade, which in turn saw the rise of cities and soul-less machines leaving us today as anxious, dependent on technology and widely divided between ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’.

While this dystopian conclusion is clearly orthogonal to Teilhard’s optimism, the observation that we have broken the implicit bonds with our environment is unquestionable.  How can happiness be possible if our evolution requires us to abandon our ancestor’s close relationship with nature?  As Gerard Manley Hopkins put it succinctly

“Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.”

   It is not so much that humans have become unable to be happy, but more that our instinctive reactions to our surroundings, kept in play for eons by the instincts of reptilian and limbic brains, no longer work as well for us as well as they did for our ancestors.  This is true for our potential for happiness as well.

So, What’s The Alternative?

  Most commentators cite Hopkin’s view of our relationship with the environment in their critique of current affairs, but few follow with his next lines:

“And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.”

    As we have seen, in Teilhard’s vision of Hopkins’ eternal upward current, he charts the many ‘changes of state’ that the ‘stuff of the universe’ undergoes in its journey towards increased complexity, such as energy to matter, simple building blocks evolving into more complex atoms, then molecules, then cells, then neurons, then brains, then consciousness.  In this upward current, each new product emerges from its predecessors’ state of complexity by way of such a change of state.   With them new capacities appear, ones that were not in play in the precedent products, but ones neither completely free of the characteristics of their predecessors.  Teilhard notes the example of the cell evolving from the increasingly complex assemblies of molecules: “the cell emerges ‘dripping in molecularity’”.  It takes some time before new cellular capacities fully emerge, and the next rung of complexity can be mounted.

In this transitory state that we find ourselves today, humans can be seen as still, to some degree, ‘dripping in animality’.  Humans may have a new capacity in the neocortex brain, but the skill of using it to advance our evolution and actualize our new potential in this new ‘change of state’ is still early in undergoing development.

An example of such a new ‘skill’ has been mentioned several times.  The skill of ‘thinking with the whole brain’ can be seen in the intellectual process of overcoming the dualisms that infect our lives by simply using the neocortex to ‘ride herd’ on the stimuli of the ‘lower’ (reptilian and limbic) brains.  It is not a matter of ignoring these stimuli; they have evolved to enrich mammalian existence and enhance the capacity for ‘survival’.  It is more a matter of becoming aware of them, understanding them to be able to manage them to enrich human existence and enhance our own unique dimensions of survival.  This skill can be further enhanced by balanced use of the ‘right’ and ‘left’ brain hemispheres as addressed in chapter 8.  These are skills which we are still learning.

Thus, the key to understanding ‘happiness’ from an evolutionary perspective is to understand what is indeed unique about the human person and how it can work (or should work) in the context of an evolving universe.

Put another way, human life is most enriched when it cooperates harmoniously into the ‘forces of evolution’.  Both humans and their environment have evolved in an evolutionary sweep of over fourteen billion years in which products have steadily increased in complexity.  Most recently this increase in complexity has been quickened by a ‘natural selection’ in which products and their environments are able to ‘fit together’ in increasingly varied combinations.

The excellent and insightful activities of science have certainly been able to quantify such things as universal time spans, the structures and configurations of evolutionary products which reflect this ‘complexification’, and details of the history of living things as well as our ontological and sociological part in it.

However, as we have seen, and as Teilhard, Sacks, Haught and Davies have pointed out, science is ‘marking time’ (Teilhard’s phrase) before it addresses what is unique about human existence: the person.  As Teilhard points out (and Davies, Haught and Sacks restate)

“Up to now, Man in his essential characteristics has been omitted from all scientific theories of nature.  For some, his “spiritual value” is too high to allow of his being included, without some sort of sacrilege, in a general scheme of history.  For others his power of choosing and abstracting is too far removed from material determinism for it to be possible, or even useful, to associate him with the elements composing the physical sciences.  In both cases, either through excessive admiration or lack of esteem, man is left floating above, or left on the edge of, the universe.”

   This, however, does not mean that humans cannot reflect upon themselves and their unique place in cosmic evolution, and begin to discern ways to use their unique capacities to better ‘fit’ into life and hence to enhance their enjoyment of it.

In addition to the ‘material’ and ‘evolutionary’ grounds of happiness, there is also a ‘spiritual’ ground to be explored.  While acknowledging that our species has nonetheless broken the bond of instinct enjoyed by our evolutionary predecessors, and that this breach is indeed a source of the ‘pain of our evolutionary convergence’ we can see how, in Teilhard’s grand vision of universal evolution, these consequences are neither unexpected nor injurious to the potential to happiness.

The Next Post

This week we looked at second of four facets of the slippery subject of happiness, this time from the perspective of universal evolution.

Next week we will begin a look at a third facet of the subject of happiness as we continue our exploration of ‘happiness’ as we address a ‘spiritual ground’.