In world of human fallibility, spiritual teachers often fall from grace. And some come back for a second act. One such teacher, let's call him AC, is attempting to recreate himself in the postmodern spiritual marketplace. Yes, I was influenced by him at one time (some of which was very positive), but after his fall I had to reexamine my notions around him and his teachings. And there are legitimate concerns around his character which has the internet abuzz. But right now, I want to tackle his metaphysics: Evolutionary Enlightenment.
First, it's important to note that Evolutionary Enlightenment came out of an Advaita path that informed AC initially. From there it was seen as augmentation to a path that denied world and soul, and to some extent even God. For many former non-dualists, it seemed the AC was bringing something new into the world: reconciling the one with the many (all of which are evolving with purpose).
Nevertheless, many aspects of a postmodern evolutionary spirituality are not new at all. The notion of a person spiritually evolving goes back to the days of Orthodox Christianity. The Church did not use the word evolution, but it was understood that there were levels to sanctification. They were seen as purification, illumination, and then deification. Other paths also have levels to an individual's spiritual evolution, whether it be attainments of Bhumis in Buddhism or Patanjali's Yoga Sutra's in Hinduism.
(It should be noted that we have many lines of development that can evolve in time, however, we are focused on the spiritual here since that is core to a spiritual teaching. Certainly, I can become more emotionally intelligent, cognitively intelligent, and kinesthetic without being spiritually orientated. And some who are spiritually evolved, can be lacking in all these areas. Human beings are complex.)
When Darwin's theory began to make a cultural impact, it was then seen that material evolution has been happening all along all the way back to the big bang. While the theory of material evolution still predominates in science, it still has challenges with some of the punctuated leaps that can not be easily explained. Nevertheless, it made sense for religion to absorb a more credible theory than Bible doctrine that said God created the world 6,000 years ago. (David Bentley Hart mentions that even in Biblical terms, “creation is seen not as a one-shot, once-and-for-all event at the beginning, but as an ongoing process throughout cosmic history, God working with nature from his eternal Now outside of time.”)
The area where things go off the rails for Evolutionary Enlightenment, is not that person and material world evolve, but now it's seen that culture evolves and more importantly, God evolves. Hence, all contradictions in Reality gets reconciled in one working principle-belief: the progress of process.
So let's first take a look at culture. Steven Pinker's Better Angels of Our Nature makes a significant point (with lots of evidence) that we have become more civilized (or less prone to warfare). So while this may be true, does it demonstrate that human nature has truly evolved or has civilization just kept it in check? You can also look at Gebser's work (which heavily influenced Ken Wilber) that there are cultural stages to evolution. Gebser was not overly firm on his structures, and certainly didn't have the evidence to back it up, but I often wonder if he was trying to fit certain cultural patterns into a model that he already preferably intuited? Personally, I have a hard time defending postmodern culture as a higher stage of development with all the secularization and relativism it has wrought. While some claim that civil and environmental rights came from this era, it could also be said the seeds of these principles were already in place in high modern culture. And taking some virtues too far to the extreme, like tolerance (which permeates our pluralistic postmodern culture), can eventually negate the benefits of it.
One anonymous poster from a message board made the interesting point that, “We're not evolving in time or in history. The Omega is pulling us upward and it appears that we are progressing in a forward direction... In fact, right now, we are regressing as far as the spiral of history goes. "Surgical" drone strikes are about as barbarous a method of warfare as I can imagine. No rattles on that flying serpent. Normally I don't feel too sorry for backward, bloodthirsty jihadis who happen to be in the vicinity when a missile lands, but I would have a hard time arguing that it was a noble or heroic business. Are we really a better people than my grandfather's generation? Sure they had fist fights for entertainment, and we prefer football, but there sure is a lot of senseless violence. Not to mention stupidity -- Rap music? All those people on "reality" television? We are a lot more vulgar than we used to be.”
When Ratzinger was asked why hasn't religion brought fruits to culture, he said, “I think that we must say first that salvation, the salvation coming from God, is not quantitative, hence, not the sum of an addition. In technical discoveries there is a growth that may proceed by fits and starts but is nonetheless somehow continuous. The purely quantitative is measurable, and one can ascertain whether there is now more or less. A quantifiable progress in mans goodness, however, is impossible, because every man is new and because in a certain respect history begins anew with every man. It is very important to learn this distinction. The goodness of man, to put it like that, is not quantifiable. We therefore cannot assume that a Christianity that in the year zero begins as a mustard seed ought to be a huge tree at the end and that everyone ought, to be able to see how much better things have gotten century by century. There can be collapses and repeated ruptures, because redemption is always entrusted to the freedom of man, and God will never annul this freedom.”
While I agree that technological developments in medicine and lifestyle have made our lives more comfortable and lasting, have we used this benefit to look into the significance of life more deeply or do we just celebrate that we have more of it? The question will always come back to what we mean by progress? Ratzinger mentions goodness, and goodness needs to be measured against something Absolute, or it becomes progress for the sake of progress.
It would seem when we look at history, there have been periods of advancement in man. But to pin it down to one period is tricky, as there are always countervailing forces in every period of culture. Some believe progress is not a positive concept, as progress can also be seen as a progression away, a distancing and withdrawal from something pure and perfect in origin (see the Fall). I am not sure I completely agree with that, as I don't necessarily believe in a Golden Age that we can point to. Some would say traditional man is higher, and some would say modern man. I would say it depends on the day you ask me. But I don't feel it is this day.
So while Evolutionary Enlightenment posits we are culturally evolving and it is up to those of us on the "leading edge" to cultivate that further, and if even true to some extent, this also can be a point of contention from a certain perspective. As Bob notes, “the entire concept of Evolutionary Enlightenment is misguided, misinformed and mistaken. [And] it's worse than that. If the evolutionary paradigm is correct, it means that people of the past were just the means to arrive at us, and hence less than fully human. This is a monstrous doctrine, for it dehumanizes anyone short of... AC? Please. On the positive side, it implies that AC is just a stage on the way to something better, so we can ignore him.”
So by saying we are more evolved we may be dehumanizing our progenitors. And “how do you feel about being a mere stepping stone to future humans who will dismiss your ideas as mythic and irrational postmodernism? The point is, the human station is a mirror of the absolute, and that any human, at any time, may access it. To suggest that AC, or Ken Wilber, or Deepak Chopra, or Tony Robbins, or Oprah Winfrey are somehow "higher" than Plato, Aristotle, St. Thomas, Meister Eckhart, or Denys -- and that's just in the West -- is absurd. You can't tell truth by a calendar” (Godwin).
Lastly, if our ideas around cultural evolution were to be seen as the raison d'être of the cosmos, and then privileged over the cultures that are geared more towards homeostasis, would this undermine something very fruitful in the world? Healing and agape should be foundational and antecedent to eros, however, in Evolutionary Enlightenment it will always be seen as secondary since process and cultural progress takes center stage.
So maybe progress should not be seen as some culturally defined vision and evolving metric in time, but a motion toward unity in Person (in terms of growth in wholeness; including aspects of love, truth, virtue, beauty, creativity, and sanctity). In Part 2 of this blog post, I look into the notion of whether or not God evolves? And what this means as a metaphysical foundation.