1. INTRODUCTION
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| 1.4.5 Wallace's Second Opinion | ||||
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That close observation of historical facts might uncover some surprising indications of what is left out of Darwinism can be seen in the history of Indian religion. That Wallace was righter than he knew is obvious to any student of world religion. Man in his ordinary state is unaware of the potential of his ‘self-consciousness’, let alone able to produce a theory of its evolution. The Shiva seal History shows the extreme antiquity of explorations of self-consciousness in the discovery of the cylinder seal of a meditating yogi from the period ca. –2000. That what we find in later Buddhism should be discovered much earlier was to be expected, and makes us suspect still earlier forms of such explorations stretching backwards into the Neolithic.[i] The Buddha phenomenon
A simple question haunts the Darwinian
account. At what point do we first see the Buddha phenomenon
and what evolutionary process can
account for it? Four states Our spontaneous usage of the term ‘self-consciousness’ fits easily into the classic sutra maps of the ‘four states of consciousness’, sleep, consciousness, self-consciousness, and an unnamed ‘fourth’ (turiya), variously referred to as ‘enlightenment’ (a much abused term). The organism, conceived as a temporal entity subject to recurrent manifestations or lives in time, is subject to ‘historical termination’ in the fourth state. One problem is Wallace’s intent to introduce some spiritual explanation into a naturalistic context. There are better approaches to this than Cartesianism, from Spinoza, to Kant, to the Indian Samkhya. Another is the claimed ‘exceptionalism’ implied by applying his objection to man only. That, again, is not the point. If chimpanzees show elements of mind then the argument could be easily backdated, no doubt, to restate the point. We should be glad that Darwinism shows us a sense of kinship with earlier primates. Man is, is not, exceptional. These are dialectical issues that tend to seesaw as we discover new evidence. But in the final analysis we should not be deprived by current efforts to find the unity of organisms from possibly claiming man crosses, or is crossing, a definite threshold into a new evolutionary stage. The tougher question revolves around the demarcation of the spiritual. Since the crux seen in the Shiva seal is the mastery of the power of attention, we can dispense with the material/spiritual distinction. It is worth noting that one of the most ancient of the strains of the yogis in question was even more ‘materialistic’ than current science, finding this ‘higher potential’ of man to be an issue of ‘material consciousness’ in an evolutionary psychology not quite like the current version. We will examine a later redaction of this called ‘Samkhya’ whose demarcation, itself still dualistic, is ‘material top to bottom’, including consciousness as ‘spirit’, and something beyond consciousness. One problem here is that a great deal of current New Age thinking is now using the term ‘evolution’ to refer to the realization by an individual of his potential, by various methods, whatever their status, but many of them descendants of those of our figure in the Shiva seal. The use of this terminology is misleading, although if spontaneous usage gains a footing, it is a fait accompli. We should at least be careful to note that this is not ‘evolution’ in the historical sense we will explore, and that this is clearly operating at a different level than even the creation of religions, for we can see the Axial dependency and transformations of Indian religion in historical times, on a far greater scale that such exemplars as Buddhism, or Hinduism, which become temporal streams with their own character. Beware of gurus attempting to coopt the idea of evolution with claims that some spiritual development under their control represents ‘evolution’. This is not historical evolution in our sense. Nonetheless, Jainism and early Buddhism give us one way to see a purely ‘evolutionary psychology’ emerging prior to the immense cultural politics, mixed with monotheism, that came later. |
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