How can mysticism be seen as a key ingredient of human evolution?
Today’s Post
Last week we looked at mysticism as a skill required to move into the future. This week we look at the part such a skill plays in human evolution.
The Mystical Role in Human Evolution
We have addressed mysticism as a skill which is required to move into the future. It is a key evolutionary skill, without which human evolution would simply be replaced by an endless repetition of replication followed by decay. (Indeed, as we have seen, many materialists consider this to be exactly what is happening.)
If we can agree that coming to recognize that whatever perception that we have of reality falls short of whatever is ‘real’, one of the challenges of life is pursuing a bridge to close this gap. Human history is filled with examples of both failing to do so and of those where success has led on to a clearer understanding of life and our part in it. The many historical attempts to solve the enigma of the ‘one and the many’, manifested in the cacophony of governmental experiments which attempted to tame human self-centered tendencies while reaping the harvest of human capabilities for collaborative labor, speak volumes of attempts to develop the skill of building this bridge.
Richard Rohr addresses the role of mysticism in developing this skill.
“Charles Péguy (1873–1914), French poet and essayist, wrote with great insight that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” Everything new and creative in this world puts together things that don’t look like they go together at all but always have been connected at a deeper level. Spirituality’s goal is to get people to that deeper level, to the unified field of nondual thinking, where God alone can hold contradictions and paradox.”
This journey from mysticism to politics frames the path of human evolution.
Teilhard offers another perspective on this path.
“Truth has only to appear once, in a single human being, for it to be impossible for anything ever to prevent it from spreading universally and setting the whole world ablaze”
Teilhard’s understanding of the slippery term, ‘truth’ is very simple. As he sees it, it is simply that understanding of reality which is most consistent with the reality itself. The more the gap between our inner grasp of reality and the reality itself is narrowed, the more confidence we can have in our understanding of it.
We have referred frequently to the statistics assembled by Johan Norberg in the quantification of our human evolution in terms of human welfare. In Chapter Four, this data was summarized in the nine categories of
Food Sanitation
Life Expectancy Poverty
Violence The Environment
Literacy Freedom
Equality
In his identification of objective historical data which shows how human welfare has increased in each of these categories, we can see aspects of the mystical basis of our journey to the future in play.
In each of the nine cases, for the specific advances which he documents, an individual or group of individuals must first become aware of some specific phenomenon, wonder as to its causality, try to replicate it, and eventually be able to reliably cause it to happen. The first two steps are intuitive in nature, then transferring to the empirical state in the last two. The first two begin with a single person, or with a small ‘psychism’, and as the movement to the second two occur the ‘reach’ of the idea extends. As we saw from Péguy above, “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” Paraphrasing this in our terms: “Every idea begins with an intuition about reality which becomes articulated into the standards by which we govern ourselves.”
In the case of a tenth category, that of ‘fuel’, this can be clearly seen. The phenomenon of ‘fire’ was experienced long before it could be caused. The ability to control heat, of course, had obvious value to human welfare, and as Teilhard notes, the ‘truth’ of this value spread inexorably among early humans. The next steps continued the spiral of development between awareness and articulation, as the need for greater thermal efficiency grew along with the need for surviving the inevitable downsides of each new articulation. The deforestation related to wood burning was replaced by the asphyxiation of coal burning, then by the atmospheric damages from gas: all resulting in ever more efficient fuel offset by new ecological risks. Each step requiring new insights into our reality followed by new articulations of these insights and new effects on human evolution requiring new insights.
Thus, the ‘mystical skill’ of humans can be seen as the essential aspect of our spiral path to the future as it is followed from our intuitional peering into liminal space through our conscious articulation into ‘ideas’ and finally emerging as the set of social norms encoded into our cultural practices. This winding path is the social counterpoint to Teilhard’s understanding of cosmic evolution: “fuller being from closer union and closer union from fuller being”.
Next Week
This week we ended our series addressing human mysticism from a secular perspective.
A key theme in this blog has been the seeing of reality, both of ourselves and the environment we inhabit, through Teilhard’s ‘lens of evolution’. In doing so, we have seen how such a seemingly secular perspective can open traditional Western religious beliefs to a new and deeper bearing on human life, one which is not only more relevant to it but more intimate with the source of life which underlies our being. Next week we will begin a series which looks into three facets of his idea of ‘evolution’ to explore how such a perspective can offer this insight.