​Thoreau and Evolving Spiritual Awareness

Readers who have followed the posts on this site are likely to be puzzled by the last three short posts, all of which have been based on passages from Henry David Thoreau.* What, might one ask, does an 18th century New England Transcendentalist have to do with the evolving nature of religion, which is the theme of this site?
Thoreau’s many passages describing his experience of the Sacred in the natural world sometimes are reminiscent of what some might call “paganism” (or, to use the far less pejorative label, animistic religions). In turn, some might then argue that this is evidence that religious consciousness doesn’t really evolve at all. If pre-Christian animists and an 18th century American transcendentalist both had a similar spiritual sensitivity to the presence of Spirit in the natural world, what evidence is there of an evolving spiritual consciousness over a span of more than 2000 years?
To that challenge, we would offer two points to consider:
 
1. Evolution and the principle of “Transcend and Include”
To suggest, as we do,  that the evolution of human spiritual awareness demonstrates an ever more expansive and fuller sense of Spirit, is not to imply that earlier spiritual experiential senses of the Sacred were false and should be rejected. Evolution always proceeds according to the pattern of transcend and include, both in the evolution of matter and the evolution of consciousness.
Ken Wilber consistently emphasizes this important insight: while evolution is a process which is constantly leading to entities with increased complexity and new traits that are different from and more complex, functional, and adaptive than what preceded them, those preceding stages are not destroyed or abandoned, but rather maintained as the basis for the newly evolved entities. In the physical realm, the formation of a molecule “transcends”, or is more than, the particles of which the molecule is composed, but the existence of the molecule does not (and cannot) destroy those particles. Similarly, an organ which is composed of a complex arrangement of cells is more than those cells, but it does not in any way negate them. And, of course, a human which is composed of a variety of organs acquires capacities (including consciousness) that are not found in any of those individual organs, but the human entity remains dependent on the organs for its material existence.
With regard to the evolution of spiritual consciousness, the obvious expansion of the human sense of Spirit in no way negates the earlier sense of Spirit, but it does expand the depth and breadth of our awareness of the Sacred. In Thoreau’s case, while he possessed a profound sense of the presence of Spirit in nature, he did so in a manner that was free from the mythic and anthropomorphic projections, as well as the sometimes brutal ethical elements (sacrificial practices of various types, including sentient beings) that are found in earlier expressions of animistic spirituality. In a sense, Thoreau’s spirituality includes the animistic sense of immanent Spirit in the natural world but also transcends it by removing the culturally conditioned mythic and anthropomorphic dimensions and expanding the circle of moral empathy.
 
2. An appropriate sense of temporal contextualization
In looking at evolution in general or spiritual evolution specifically, it is necessary to keep in mind the basic truth that evolution proceeds over vast stretches of time. That humans in the first century c.e. thought about spiritual matters in ways that are similar to how many humans think about such things today is not surprising, given that 2000 years is a very short period of time when we’re looking at evolutionary development. Philosopher J.L. Schellenberg has explored this theme in great depth in his wonderful trilogy on religious faith, where he repeatedly urges us to consider humanity as a fairly new, immature species, that has only recently acquired the capacity to experience and reflect upon the presence of a Transcendent or Spiritual reality.
Of course, some things have changed if we look at the evolution of the human spiritual sensibility from Neolithic pre-Axial cultures to today. A greater sense of the moral quality of Spirit and an ever-expanding sense of moral responsibility beyond the human species to other sentient beings are important evolutionary developments in spiritual awareness, and 3000 years is a relatively short period of time for such a development to occur.
So one should not be surprised to find animistic elements of a nature-based spirituality in Thoreau (and his fellow Transcendentalists), nor should one be surprised that Thoreau’s spiritual awareness is in some ways different from what preceded him. That’s how evolution works. That’s “transcend and include.”
 
All of this leads to the most intriguing question: what happens next?
Yes, it will take centuries or perhaps millennia for the next stage in the evolution of human spirituality to emerge. And yes, that process will be so slow and organic that it likely will go largely unnoticed. And in all likelihood, it will lead to a spiritual awareness that is utterly incomprehensible to 21st century humans, in the same way that non-dual mysticism and the moral duty to all sentient beings would have been incomprehensible to our ancestors from 40,000 years ago when, just yesterday, the religious sensibility appears to have emerged in our species.  How will the slowly evolving capacity of human consciousness to experientially intuit the spiritual element of the Cosmos, following the principle of transcend and include, manifest in new forms of spiritual experience and understanding?
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*It should be noted that Thoreau enthusiastically read Darwin’s On the Origin of Species shortly after its publication, although, of course, he did not apply the concept of evolution to consciousness or spiritual experience.
 
                             

Thoreau and the Experience of Transcendence in Nature
 
“This is a delicious evening, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore. I go and come with a strange liberty in Nature, a part of herself…..I was suddenly sensible of such sweet and beneficent society in Nature, in the very pattering of the drops, and in every sound and sight around my house, an infinite and unaccountable friendliness all at once like an atmosphere sustaining me….Every little pine needle expanded and swelled with sympathy and befriended me. I was so distinctly made aware of the presence of something kindred to me….”
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Henry David Thoreau, “Solitude” in Walden

Henry David Thoreau: Spiritual Minimalist
 
Writing well over a century ago, the American Transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau clearly had a sense of what we have previously (see blog post from 11/8/23) referred to as Epistemological Humility and Spiritual Minimalism, when in defining religion in his journal entry of August 18,1858, he wrote:
 
                                    “What is religion? That which is never spoken.”

Consciousness, Evolution, and Religion:
The Importance of the Content of Consciousness
 
The close and inextricable relationship between the evolution of consciousness, the emergence of the human capacity to perceive a spiritual dimension of reality, and the development of religions in their many and varied manifestations has become a common theme in the exploration of the evolution of religion and the broader field of consciousness studies. Fortunately, after decades of being consigned to the status of a taboo subject for serious investigation, since the mid-1990s the topic of consciousness – its nature, origin, and function - has produced an explosion of sophisticated and meaningful works, in books, scholarly publications, blogs, etc. The enormity and complexity of this body of work has recently been captured by Robert Lawrence Kuhn in his remarkable piece, A landscape of consciousness:Towardataxonomyofexplanationsandimplications (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610723001128via%3Dihub&fbclid=IwY2xjawEppAlleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHdinYJZ37AprVucT1BLJ9zmIvGNyixJarHvlAnH_1QpTpbrVVLleOrTgcg_aem_ZvpFMekpBMRXjWVOBYraGA).
 
And yet, despite finally acquiring the status of a fully legitimate area of study and the proliferation of work that has been produced as a result of that status, for both scholars and the general public, we would suggest that something is missing in much of contemporary consciousness studies, namely an exploration and appreciation of the actual content of consciousness. As a general phenomenon, much has been said about the nature of consciousness, but often in a manner that fails to recognize the extraordinary quality of the content of consciousness, particularly when viewed in an evolutionary context. Here we will present just a brief summary of this issue, with a fuller treatment to follow at a later date.
 
Consciousness as Qualia
Ever since the 1990s work of Thomas Nagel and David Chalmers, both of whom were instrumental in returning consciousness to the status of a legitimate subject of serious scientific and philosophical exploration, the focus of most of this work has been on the exploration of the general nature of consciousness as that which is understood in terms of qualia, or subjective experience, as perhaps best understood by Nagel’s characterization of consciousness as  “what it is like” to have an experience. Some might suggest that roughly five decades of extensive production in the fields of science and philosophy is perhaps a bit much to convincingly establish the reality of something that is always present to any waking human with an healthy operative brain. And yet, much of consciousness research has focused on the questions of whether consciousness even exists and whether consciousness can be reduced to and explained in strictly materialist terms. Much of this work has revolved around what Chalmers labeled the “hard problem” of consciousness: the “easy” problem is establishing various correlations between events in the brain and conscious experience, but the “hard” problem attempts (without success, many would argue) to grapple with the issue of what consciousness is, or its ontological status as something that cannot be explained, described, or categorized in strictly materialist terms. 
In the debate between materialists and non-materialists (who often, although certainly not always, also support belief in the reality of a (frequently non-traditional) spiritual dimension), this is of course a fundamental issue, and the enormous body of work derived from the arguments back and forth is understandable.
But this focus on the very existence and nature of consciousness, usually understood in terms of a defense of the reality of non-physical qualia, has been so intense that the actual content of consciousness often has been neglected. This is unfortunate, for we are suggesting that the evolution of consciousness has produced, in the human species at least (and perhaps in other species elsewhere in the Cosmos, but that sort of speculation is not our concern), awareness of non-material realities that are utterly remarkable (and that’s an understatement) and hardly the sort of thing that one might expect to emerge out of the rearrangement of particles of matter over roughly 14 billion years. By ignoring the content of consciousness, much of contemporary scientific, philosophical, and even spiritual thought about consciousness, thus presents a very diluted understanding of consciousness, where consciousness is defined in terms of only awareness, subjectivity, “what it’s like to be”. We are suggesting, in other words, that consciousness isn’t just about “qualia.”

Mapping the Content of Consciousness
In a sense, it’s easy to appreciate the existence of a certain reticence about offering any sort of authoritative map of the contents of consciousness, given that this would involve exploration of something that is entirely internal, hidden from the public view which is privileged in much of scientific thought, and subject to evolutionary change over the long span of human development. Various maps have been developed, many grounded in the earlier work of Jean Gebser and influenced by the non-mainstream work of Ken Wilber.
Here we have no intention to attempt the gargantuan task of articulating an exhaustive account of these various models of the content of consciousness, but for the sake of providing context for the larger point that we are trying to make, a generalized and admittedly incomplete model of the evolution of consciousness would likely include the following:
        1. Sensory awareness: The simplest form of perception, found in a rudimentary sense in pre-human life forms and reaching a fuller expression in the human capacity for awareness generated through the five senses of touch, sight, sound, smell, and taste.
        2. Spatial consciousness: Whereas sensory awareness is direct, spatial consciousness emerges only with the development of the capacity to engage (consciously or unconsciously) in the capacity to contextualize sensory perceptions, distinguishing between here and there.
        3. Temporal consciousness: Similar to spatial consciousness, temporal consciousness emerges only with the development of the capacity to engage (consciously or unconsciously) in the capacity to contextualize perceptions in a temporal sense, distinguishing between now, then, and not yet.
        4. Memory: In conjunction with the above referenced development of the capacity for spatial and temporal consciousness and presumably occurring as a co-development rather than as an isolated step, at some point the content of human consciousness evolved to the point of distinguishing between realities that are present and realities that 1) were once present, 2) are no longer so, but are 3) retained in consciousness with varying degrees of vividness, accuracy, etc.
        5. Self-other: Awareness of the sense of a separate self, which may include but is certainly not an immediately apparent corollary of perception of the body of another, at some point in our evolutionary development became an established component of the content of consciousness, subsequently leading to an even deeper sense of self as something which has the capacity to exist outside the body, whether in shamanic spirit flights or the many concepts of a post-mortem afterlife found in early religions and refined in Axial Age traditions.
        6. Abstract thought: The capacity to hold in one’s consciousness “ideas,” or non-material realities that are not immediately present in the “external” world and to manipulate these ideas (through reasoning, mathematics) marks a significant development in the evolution of human consciousness into areas that are only minimally present in other life forms.
        7. Will/intentionality: Many of the philosophers who choose to deny the existence of consciousness also choose to deny the reality of will, or intentionality, despite the fact that, like consciousness, it is immediately present to us and is reflected in the very acting of choosing to deny it. Our intent here isn’t to get into the debate about the degree to which human intentionality can be characterized as an exercise of free will, but rather to simply assert that at some point in the evolution of our species, the remarkable capacity to make intentional decisions emerged. As with consciousness, intentionality does not appear to be an exclusively human quality, but the extent to which humans have the capacity to make intentional choices based on conscious reflection is qualitatively different than that evidenced by any other species, and hence represents one of the hallmarks of human uniqueness.
        8. Emotions: The richness of the human internal affective content also reflects a progressive evolutionary development of consciousness, as evidenced in the range of human awareness of different emotional states and expressions. In the course of human consciousness evolution, higher affective qualities such as love, awe, and wonder have developed to further differentiate human from other forms of consciousness which include affective states of awareness but only of a more basic sort.

The above account of the evolution of the content of consciousness speaks to the need to recognize that consciousness is far more than a sense of “what it is like to be…”, or perhaps more precisely, it confirms that the human sense of “what it is like to be” has evolved over time, such that a full appreciation of the nature of human consciousness needs to take into consideration this steady expansion of the content of consciousness, which has led to a fuller and fuller awareness of reality. What early humans were capable of perceiving through their nascent consciousness was less than what contemporary humans are capable of perceiving through their currently-evolved mode of consciousness. Contemporary humans simply have a fuller experience of the totality of the real than did our predecessors, whether within the species or prior to it.
 
The Supersensory or Transcendental Content of Consciousness
And yet, the above account of the evolution of consciousness, however remarkable it might be, only brings us to the doorstep of the truly unique nature of evolved human consciousness, for, in addition to the various sensory and abstract contents of consciousness as described above, consciousness provides access to an awareness (however dim) of what we can variously describe as supersensory, transcendental, or spiritual dimensions of reality.
In the human form, there has emerged a consciousness through which there is the recognition that reality consists of Something More than the totality of the sensory realm of matter, energy, space, and time. Through human consciousness, we find an awareness of a spiritual or transcendent dimension that reveals the presence of meaning and value in the Cosmos. The sense of spiritual qualities such as moral goodness, love, meaning, and the many other transcendental dimensions of existence are not available through the sensory perception of the material dimension of the world. But through consciousness as it has evolved in the human species, we gain (admittedly in what is often a sporadic, ambiguous, and ineffable sense), an awareness of a qualitative, spiritual, meaning-laden dimension of the Cosmos which is not otherwise apparent.
This supersensory or transcendental aspect of consciousness has, of course, been accessed through the contemplative practices of prolonged meditation and other spiritual techniques in various religious traditions for centuries, but we would suggest that it is also part of the everyday awareness of modern humans, and that such supersensory or spiritual awareness is not dependent on a connection to any particular religious tradition. Just as human consciousness evolved over time to slowly provide all humans with the capacity to perceive time, abstract ideas, number, and other mundane qualities of reality, so consciousness has continued to evolve to the point where the perception of the transcendental spiritual qualities such as meaning and moral goodness have similarly become a standard dimension of consciousness in most humans.
But returning to the topic of this essay, our larger point here is that in the contemporary study of consciousness which tends to explore the mere existence of consciousness but not its content, the utterly remarkable nature of the content of consciousness is overlooked.
Granted, there occasionally is a recognition – almost passing in nature – of the content of consciousness, as in Phillip Goff’s recent Why, where he states, “But there is more to human consciousness than these raw sensations. Human consciousness is also permeated with meaning and understanding.” (Why, 50) But such an observation is made without sufficient recognition of what an astounding assertion it is! Yes, the very existence of a non-material, irreducible something such as consciousness is remarkable, but even more remarkable is what consciousness has allowed us to gain access to, producing a content that needs to be acknowledged in a spirit of sufficient wonder and awe. Appreciating the remarkable nature of consciousness is not just a matter of “what it’s like to be” something, but rather what it’s like to be something which senses dimensions of reality that nothing else in the (known) Cosmos has access to! How remarkable that over the course of 14 billion years, ever-changing constellations of energy and particles have evolved with sufficient complexity that in at least one complex organism (the human) there has emerged awareness of a dimension of the Cosmos, characterized by moral value and meaning, that is otherwise invisible and unknown. In ordinary everyday language, this is a really big deal! – and yet it is commonly treated in a casual manner or simply overlooked.
 
Of course, skeptical reductionists will diminish the uniqueness of the content of consciousness by essentially passing it off as nothing more than human inventiveness responding to the need for psychological defense mechanisms (religious concepts such as meaning and an afterlife were invented to protect against the terror of loss, suffering, and death) and the need for social order (religion, meaning, and value were invented to help maintain social control - people fearful of eternal punishment and hopeful of eternal reward are more likely to act in a way that is conducive to the perpetuation of orderly society).
This is not the place to engage in a complicated analysis of the flaws of such simplistic reductionism. Rather, we shall simply point out that reductionism, which argues (often on rather weak grounds) that humans create value and meaning, is being increasingly challenged by the position that consciousness is the vehicle that allows us to discover value and meaning, which are already “out there” as ontological realities that exist independent of human perception.
Phillip Goff (far from being a defender of traditional theism) nicely articulates this position in his description of Value Fundamentalism in the opening chapter of Why?, where he refers to value as “primitive facts in their own right”(11) that cannot be passed off as mere human creations.
Similarly, in his recent Notes on Complexity, Neil Theise argues that just as mathematical Platonism posits mathematics as something that “awaits human discovery, not human invention,” (131), the same can be said about meaning, value, and transcendental qualities such as Goodness and Truth: they exist as aspects of reality which, at a certain point in the evolution of consciousness, humans acquired the capacity to discover or perceive, however imperfectly at this rather early stage of human development.
 
The Point
To summarize, then, the point of all of the above: On the one hand, we should recognize the remarkable developments in the field of consciousness studies that have emerged since the 1990s, during which time consciousness has gone from a taboo, derided topic to a widely accepted subject of mainstream philosophical and scientific inquiry. This development has included, at least among non-reductionists, a recognition of what a remarkable and  mysterious phenomenon consciousness appears to be.
But that recognition in itself is insufficient: in addition to acknowledging the remarkable nature of consciousness as “what it is like to be” a subject capable of experiencing qualia, we should be even more astounded by the content of consciousness, or that which consciousness makes it possible for us to perceive, namely the non-material but ontologically real aspects of the Cosmos. As a result of human consciousness in its present state of evolutionary development, we know that the Cosmos is more than stuff: it is also a reality saturated with meaning and value, including qualities of Goodness and Truth that, in the absence of consciousness in its present state of development, would not be known. In the human form in its current state of evolutionary development, a being composed of particles of matter/energy has developed a degree of complexity that results in the (still unexplained) emergence of an immaterial reality (consciousness) that allows us to achieve the perception of aspects of the Cosmos that are utterly immaterial and transcendent. In essence, through consciousness we are granted confirmation that we exist in a Cosmos infused with meaning and value, and as such, we should always view consciousness with reverence and awe. 
 
 
 

​If human consciousness continues to evolve (slowly and sporadically) in such a manner that humans continue to acquire a fuller, more expansive sense of the nature of Spirit, what are the implications for the existing traditional religions which all emerged over 2000 years ago from the mode of human spiritual awareness (more mythic, dualist, anthropomorphic and anthropocentric) that was dominant at that time? 
While we can only hazard vague educated guesses about what the many dimensions of the post-traditional religion of the 21st century and beyond will look like, it seems reasonable to assert with considerable confidence that future religion will be characterized by an embrace of religious pluralism and a rejection of exclusivism. The notion that there is only one true religion and that religions can be neatly categorized into “true” and “false” is already rapidly disappearing among many populations, and the pluralistic appreciation of a multiplicity of spiritual beliefs and practices will likely, over time, become the new norm. The exclusivist assertion that there is only one true religion, one true revelation, one true set of beliefs, and one true path to salvation is simply not credible to people whose perspective is fully informed by study of the history of religions, which exposes the sociopolitical factors that influence the formation of each religion; study of World Religions, which demonstrates the multiple commonalities between traditions; and, perhaps most importantly, direct experience with people of other faiths, which is inevitable in an increasingly multi-cultural world in which traditional boundaries of communication and interaction are rapidly collapsing.
 
We already see a movement away from the traditional exclusivist norm as, for instance, the boundaries between various branches of Christianity are dissolving, with practicing Lutherans being quite comfortable attending a Presbyterian service or even a Catholic Mass, and indeed with many Protestants not even familiar with the theological differences that once created a sharp and often acrimonious wall between different denominations. Today many Protestant Christians would be hard-pressed to describe the theological differences between, for instance, Lutheranism, Methodism, and Presbyterianism, and many (perhaps most) mainline Protestant congregations are populated by members who are there simply by virtue of family tradition rather than theological choice.
 
But this openness to other traditions also extends beyond the different branches of one’s own faith and into completely different traditions, as we see, for instance, Christians and Jews engaging in activities such as practicing Buddhist meditation, participating in Hindu religious festivals, participating in indigenous shamanic rituals, and reading sacred texts from multiple traditions.
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We appear to be heading for what Duane Bidwell has referred to as believers who are “spiritually fluid” (see Bidwell’s When One Religion Isn’t Enough:  The Lives of Spiritually Fluid People). Rather than feeling a need to be confined to one tradition, the spiritually fluid believers (which appear to be rapidly increasing in numbers) do not identify with any one tradition, but feel comfortable drawing different elements of their spiritual life from different religions. The spiritually fluid believer might, for instance, participate in a Christian Mass, practice Buddhist meditation, hold a worldview derived from Hindu Vedanta, and read Confucius for ethical guidance, all the while seeing no conflict in the blending of various traditions and not exclusively identifying with any one of them. To the spiritually fluid believer, being religious does not require identification with a specific historical tradition, but rather consists of an acceptance of and commitment to spiritual reality that transcends association with any particular expression of faith.
This is not to suggest movement toward a naïve and uncritical acceptance of any and all ideas and practices labelled “spiritual” by someone somewhere. Discernment of what is spiritually and ethically meaningful and edifying necessarily will continue to occur, but from a starting point of openness to the reception of elements (beliefs, practices, experiences, etc.) of religious value from any tradition. One’s own favored tradition or the historically dominant tradition of one’s culture will no longer automatically have a privileged place as the arbiter of what constitutes spiritual legitimacy.
 
This embrace of pluralism and movement toward spiritual fluidity doesn’t mean that we are necessarily headed toward some sort of universal, global One Religion. Spiritual beliefs and practices are influenced by many variables, some reflecting differences in personality and taste, some reflecting local traditions, and countless other subtle differences in human personality and culture that lead to a preference for one rather than another mode of spirituality. These factors will likely ensure that, as the religion of the future slowly evolves, it will develop along branches that reflect these many differences in preference, but the new normal in which such variations exist will almost certainly be one which strongly affirms religious pluralism, respecting but not constrained by the traditional Axial Age religions which still dominant the world’s spiritual landscape.
 

The “meaning of Meaning” in 21st Century Spirituality
 
Religion traditionally has been the basis for a belief that life has meaning, even though the precise nature of that meaning can often be somewhat vague and difficult to define. The very notion of “meaning in life” has such a broad scope that simply defining the meaning of meaning is a challenge. When we say that life has meaning, what exactly does that even mean?

In most traditional religions, meaning is derived from teachings associated with a divine revelation of some sort, a sacred text that contains the content of that revelation, doctrines that religious leaders promulgate to expand and clarify their interpretation of that meaning, and a body of church authorities who in various ways enforce that interpretation.
 
But what about 21st century spirituality, which we have suggested will increasingly move toward a religious perspective in which there is no discrete act of divine revelation, no authoritative holy book, an absence of specific and detailed propositional belief statements, and lack of confidence in a hierarchy of religious authorities who are deemed to be especially qualified to produce and enforce doctrine? In a 21st century spirituality which lacks these traditional elements of religion, can there still be a basis for believing that there is meaning?
 
Looking at the past century or so, there would appear to be ample evidence to suggest that as traditional religion has declined, the loss of a sense of meaning has increased. At the most extreme end, we see the rise of full scale nihilism, as expressed in various aspects of modern Western culture. At the popular level, we see a desperate attempt to find “meaning-substitutes” in activities such as consumerism, entertainment (sports, social media, streaming, music), a general hedonism which has included increased drug and alcohol abuse, and a glorification of sex. Intellectually, we see various expressions of nihilism and substitute meaning-mechanisms in art, music, literature, philosophy, and much more that comes out of the world of academia and intellectual circles (e.g., certain interpretations of deconstruction and post-modernism).
 
Clearly, then, we live at a time of a widespread loss of a sense that there is any deeper meaning to our existence, and this loss of meaning parallels a decline in the traditional religions. But if the traditional Axial Age religions continue to decline, will the 21st c. be left without any sense of ultimate meaning to our existence? Or, as a post-Axial, post-traditional, 21st century slowly emerges, will a new source of and sense of meaning also appear?
 
An encouraging sign is the reappearance in the philosophical community, after decades in which even hinting at meaning was greeted with derision, of serious speculation on the possibility that we live in a meaningful Cosmos. Such speculation has not been confined to philosophers and theologians: in exploring the puzzling picture of reality that emerged in the early 20th century from quantum physics, scientists such as Ervin Schrodinger, Freeman Dyson, and Roger Penrose have in various ways offered hints at how a post-traditional religion sense of meaning might be evolving. The legitimacy of talking about meaning can also be seen in serious philosophical writings by the likes of Bernardo Kastrup, Jared Goff, Robert Wright, Samuel Wilkinson, and even the generally skeptical Thomas Nagel (for those who prefer a video presentation on this issue, see the wonderful articulation of how a 21st century sense of meaning might look in Bernardo Kastrup’s remarks on meaning, especially between the 13:00 and 25:00 marks, in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zfPKSRU-RI).
 
That Oxford University Press would publish a book with the title Why? The Purpose of the Universe, by a mainstream philosopher such as Jared Goff provides compelling evidence that thinking about meaning is no longer considered the passé practice that it once was.  The same can be said about Samuel Wilkinson’s unequivocally titled Purpose: What Evolution and Human Nature Imply about the Meaning of our Existence.
 
But what do we even mean by Meaning?....The meaning of Meaning
 
Of course, talking about the meaning of existence is hardly a modest sort of task. Quite to the contrary, one could argue that in a proper spirit of epistemological humility, we might do well to avoid any effort at speculating on what could be considered the ultimate question, so ultimate that it might well be unanswerable using the modest means of knowledge that humans possess.
 
And then there is the issue of even defining what we are talking about: what do we even mean when we refer to the meaning of existence? In some ways, how we answer the question of meaning presupposes how we define meaning, creating a circularity that further compromises the legitimacy of the entire enterprise.
 
And yet, despite these challenges, it remains the case that human beings are meaning-seeking creatures. In a sense, we just can’t help ourselves from asking the question of what is the meaning of existence even while knowing that we don’t exactly understand the question and probably can’t answer it anyway. Nonetheless, over the span of 14 billion years, the evolutionary process has somehow managed to bring forth this entity called homo sapiens, which has evolved a sufficiently developed consciousness to reflect on its own existence and ask the fundamental question, “Why,” (and, implicitly, does a “why” even exist?).
 
So with these acknowledged challenges in mind, let’s take a look first at different meanings of meaning, and then finally get to the question of how meaning can be found in the post-mythic, post-traditional-religion that is likely to emerge in 21st century spirituality.
 
Two models of Meaning
 
We hardly can examine the multitude of specific answers, offered by philosophers and religious seekers in all cultures in all eras since at least 3000 years ago, to the question of what is the ultimate meaning of existence. That’s far more than what we have room for here. But among the many different interpretations of meaning, we can discern two models that help us identify two common approaches of thinking about meaning. We will refer to those models as:
          1. The Historical or Grand Narrative model, and
          2. The ahistorical or Personal Model
 
The Grand Narrative/Historical Model of Meaning
The historical or grand narrative model grounds the belief in meaning in the context of a purposeful, orderly, teleological development of history, past, present, and future. This model counters the notion of a universe as chaotic and directionless with the idea of a purposeful, directed creation, usually under the guidance of a personal deity as understood in terms of traditional theism. A God exists, evidence of this God is found in the narrative of the history of the Universe, and the meaning of our lives is confirmed through belief that we are part of that purposeful divine plan.
We see the Grand Narrative model of meaning playing a dominant role in the Abrahamic religions, particularly in the fundamentalist interpretations of all three. Christians, Jews, and Muslims all take comfort in the belief that we live in a world created by a good and all-powerful God, who is providentially guiding that Universe to a final fulfillment. For Jews, this is seen in the past acts of God sending prophets and a future act of God sending a Messiah. Christians similarly believe in a God who influences history though the messages of prophets, culminating (so far) in God sending the Messiah in the person of Jesus, with the meaning of the future understood in the context of an eventual judgement, return of the Messiah, and establishment of the Kingdom of God. Among Christians, there might be much disagreement about the specific timing and content of these future events, but there is general agreement that the historical process is providentially guided by God toward an eventual fulfillment. Muslims adopt a similar concept of history, with the added belief that God has already sent the final prophet (Muhammed), who will also be involved in a final Judgment at some future point.
 
While the role of the Grand Narrative is somewhat less important in the world religions that are not part of the Abrahamic tradition, we certainly see it in resurging Hindu fundamentalism and even in the Buddhist belief in multiple incarnations of the Buddha, including the Buddha yet to come, Maitreya.
 
In all of these examples, a Grand Narrative allows believers to see their lives as meaningful in the context of a larger, divinely guided, historical process. Daily human life might be full of pain, sorrow, tragedy, injustice, and inevitable death, but if all of this is seen in the context of the Grand Narrative, meaning is preserved.
 
 The Ahistorical/Personal Model of Meaning
The ahistorical or personal model of meaning focuses not on the long march of history but rather on each individual’s own life. In this model, meaning is something that exists and can be known and experienced by each believer through a relationship with the divine, regardless of whatever is happening in the larger historical process. In Christianity, for example, the denominations which derive from the Pietist tradition tend to focus on each individual’s inner relationship with God, and it is in the internal experience of closeness to God that meaning is known. In Christian philosophy, no one expressed this approach to meaning better than the Danish Lutheran philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard, in his famous dictum, “Subjectivity is Truth.” In this phrase, Kierkegaard was not denying that there is objective truth: as a Christian believer he most certainly believed that the existence of God was “objectively” true. However, Kierkegaard argued that we do not find God and the meaning associated with Him through an objective rational analysis of philosophical concepts or historical events (he harshly criticized Hegel for doing just that). Rather, God is found, along with meaning and salvation, in an inner personal awareness of God. In a sense, God exists objectively but is known only through (to use Kierkegaard’s preferred word) subjectivity. Kierkegaard came out of the Pietist tradition of Lutheranism, which has influenced and been influenced by, many other Christian denominations that place little emphasis on understanding any sort of Grand Narrative that documents the historical process through which God has, does, and will guide the world. Such an understanding of the historical process is not necessary if God is found in one’s heart.
 
It should be noted, however, that despite the clear differences between these two models of meaning, they are not necessarily in conflict with each other, and in most Christian denominations they co-exist, but with differing degrees of emphasis and importance. Fundamentalist Christians who strongly emphasize the Grand Narrative of Dispensational Premillennialism might hear sermons full of Biblical interpretations of current political events and socio-political developments, along with predictions of where this is headed as per the Grand Narrative. But those same fundamentalists also seek an inner “born again” experience of God in which they come to know God in an intimate way which bestows a sense of meaning on their life regardless of their understanding of the Grand Narrative.
 
Meaning, Transcendence and Immanence
 
Another key aspect of our perception of meaning, regardless of whether it is understood according to the Grand Narrative or personal interpretation, is the simultaneous presence of both immanent and transcendent elements.

Meaning has an immanent quality to the extent that we find it in specific, concrete, lived moments in this embodied existence as conscious beings in a world of matter, energy, space, and time. In the love of a mother for her child, in an act of selflessness and sacrifice, in moments of courage, in altruistic deeds that put the needs of another ahead of one’s own interests, in a quiet act of compassionate discretion and in a public act of opposition to injustice – in countless ways, through what we say and do in real-life situations, we gain a sense that our choices matter, and, in some small, mysterious, indefinable way, contribute to Something that is larger than ourselves, Something of an abiding spiritual nature. We might not be able to articulate exactly how our action is meaningful, but we can sense it at a deep, intuitive level. As such, to the extent that we experience meaning through events and actions in the concrete specificity of our life, meaning has an immanent quality.
 
And yet, while meaning is manifested in various concrete expressions of aspects of human experience, and as such has an immanent quality, meaning is always connected to and grounded in a transcendent dimension. By “transcendent” we do not mean the traditional anthropomorphic mythic deity. Rather, we mean a reality – an Ultimate Reality to use traditional philosophical language – that is in some sense more than and not dependent on, the totality of matter, energy, space, and time. Whether we call it God, Spirit, Buddha-nature, Brahman, or whatever term is used in one’s culture to refer to the transcendent reality, it is always in relationship to that transcendent reality that meaning is understood. Meaning emerges in the recognition that, with reference to our life, it’s not “all about me,” but rather all about something much bigger than me, something to which I am intimately connected as a part, but only a part.

In purely immanent terms, divorced from a recognition of Transcendence, it would appear that our lives are characterized by an indifferent transience in which we come and go, leaving no lasting imprint on a world which is impermanent, harsh, and cold. But human consciousness has evolved to the point where, however dimly, we recognize that there really is Something More than the transient realm, and that Something More is the source and guarantor of a meaningful existence. Humans are certainly embodied creatures who are immersed in pain, suffering, evil, and ultimately, bodily death. But humans are also creatures who have developed the capacity for a conscious intuitive awareness of their connection to and dependence on that ineffable reality that we variously refer to as Spirit, God, etc., and it is only through a sense of that connection to the transcendent that we can sense the presence of meaning.
 
As Ernest Becker so deftly described in his classic work, The Denial of Death, humans exert enormous effort to convince themselves that meaning can be found in all sorts of substitutes for Transcendence: careers, sports, entertainment, accumulation of wealth, consumption of goods, hedonistic pleasure, and on and on. And yet the pursuit of these substitutes never brings satisfaction, only an endless pursuit of the next substitute meaning, not unlike the hamster perpetually chasing its tail around the wheel. Only when one’s immanent efforts are recognized as connected to a Transcendent reality, does a true sense of abiding meaning appear.
 
 Meaning in 21st Century Spirituality: The Two Models
 
All of the above leads us, finally, to the question which is the focus of this post: Is a sense of meaning available in 21st century spirituality? Once one has set aside the traditional mythic deity, lost confidence in the divine origin of sacred texts, and abandoned belief in traditional dogmas and the ecclesiastical authorities who create and defend them, can one still retain a sense that existence is meaningful?
 
The answer is that not only is a post-traditional spirituality something that provides a firm basis for a confident sense of the meaningfulness of existence, but it does so in a manner that is far more credible to the contemporary citizen than is a sense of meaning that is sourced in ancient texts and faith in inaccessible historical events. Meaning in contemporary spirituality is empirically based, part of our lived experience. And a post-traditional spirituality affirms the meaningfulness of existence according to both of the models that we referenced above.
 
The Grand Narrative of 21st Century Spirituality
 The traditional meta-narrative rooted in a mythic anthropomorphic deity with its parochial favoritism and ethical imperfections, described in the Bible and other sacred texts, is no longer be credible to many and hence no longer functions as a meaning-supporting story. But a new meta-narrative, full of meaning and compatible with all elements of a 21st century sensibility, has emerged: the evolution of the Cosmos.
 
The evolutionary understanding of the Universe (including, but not limited to life on Earth) provides a grand narrative that supports belief in a Universe that is directional and purposeful, and hence meaningful. When seen in its totality, the evolution of the Universe presents a grand, elegant, breathtaking view of a cosmic process that steadily moves forward from energy to matter to life to consciousness, and then on to the emergence of increasingly sensitive and expansive capacities for conscious awareness, including a sense of the Transcendent, spiritual, meaning-imbued fundamental nature of Being.
 
Of course, the spiritual implications of the evolutionary model are often not recognized: traditional believers reject the evolutionary process altogether because of perceived conflicts with their literalist account of sacred texts; the scientific community focuses only on the details of the process and refuses to recognize the bigger picture which it conveys. But fortunately, increasing numbers in both the scientific and religious communities are breaking free from the myopic blindness of both fundamentalist religion and fundamentalist scientism, and recognizing that evolution can indeed suggest that we exist in a meaningful Universe that is guided by ordering principles.
 
Specifically, when viewed in its full cosmic context, the evolutionary process depicts reality as something that for 14 billion years has been developing according to finely tuned laws that produce entities of increasing complexity, eventually leading to the emergence of life, and later to the emergence of living entities that have conscious awareness, and culminating (so far, at least, in the tiny corner of the Universe which we can perceive) in the emergence of an entity whose level of complexity and consciousness has resulted in a being with the capacity to perceive not only sensory phenomena but also the spiritual quality behind/within/above that sensory world. It is the evolutionary process that has given the Universe a creature with the capacity to intuitively sense the presence of Spirit. In a sense, not only is it not the case that evolution and religion are at odds, but rather evolution has given us religion, to the extent that religion is the product of the evolved capacity of human consciousness to intuit a spiritual dimension of reality. From this perspective, religion and evolution are friends, not enemies.
 
Looked at from a different angle, the long history of the Universe suggests that its evolutionary direction is one of being slowly spiritualized, or gradually becoming a Cosmos in which there exist beings which possess a non-physical property (consciousness) through which has evolved an  increasingly sensitive spiritual awareness. The evolving Cosmos at some point ceased to be something that produced only novel forms of matter/energy, and began to produce beings which were not only living but capable of a mode of perception that extended beyond the sensory realm to an awareness of the transcendent (and immanent) reality of Spirit.
 
This understanding of evolution as essentially a spiritualizing process was articulated early in the 20th century by the likes of the French priest Teilhard de Chardin and the Hindu yogi Aurobindo Ghose. Thomas Berry fought for the adoption of this “New Story” as he called it, and that task has been carried on by the likes of Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker. Among contemporary spiritual writers, Ken Wilber is one of the most articulate and prolific advocates of evolution as the new Grand Narrative. Even mainstream philosophers, such as Philip Goff, Robert Wright, and Bernardo Kastrup, who are not associated with the advocacy of any particular spiritual position, have come to agree that an objective, all-encompassing perspective on the evolutionary process, freed from the biases of both fundamentalism and scientism, suggests that we are indeed in a Universe that is evolving in a meaningful way.
 
Of course, this is not to suggest that there are no challenges to the adoption of evolution as a new Grand Narrative of meaning, but such challenges exist even for traditional theism, where the problem of reconciling the all-powerful and benevolent creator God with the presence of suffering in the world has vexed believers and professional theologians for centuries, producing countless unsuccessful theodicies, or attempts to explain how a good and all-powerful God could permit such suffering to occur.
 
The evolutionary Grand Narrative shares similar challenges (which we will explore in later posts), but at least the evolutionary model is grounded in an honest starting point, based on our presently available conscious awareness. For the believer who seeks faith that is grounded in a story that is credible in light of what humans know today, rather than in light of what they believed to be the case over 2000 years ago, the evolutionary model provides a credible Grand Narrative in a way that the traditional theistic story can no longer do.
 
 The ahistorical Personal Model in 21st Century Spirituality
 And yet, however appealing the Grand Narrative model might be, both emotionally (by providing a truly awe-inspiring vision of the cosmic process) and intellectually (by providing a credible account of not only the evolution of the Cosmos, but also how consciousness and spirituality have emerged as a natural part of that process), it has a serious flaw. The Grand Narrative model situates the basis for meaning in the entirety of the vast cosmic evolutionary process. But what about the individual conscious entities that function as an integral and necessary part of that process? What about those individual conscious beings who, for whatever reason, do not have access to the Grand Narrative vision to provide meaning in their life? And how can the Grand Narrative model provide meaning for individual conscious beings who suffer and die? If a universe evolving toward a magnificent end does so only at the cost of heartlessly discarding the billions of precious individual entities that it consumes in reaching that telos, can that really be a meaningful Universe? (Teilhard and Aurobindo, perhaps the two greatest Grand Narrativists of our time, both struggled with this question and never produced a convincing response).
 
If meaning exists, then, it must exist not only for the Cosmic Process, but also for the individual conscious entities that are part of that process. The meaningfulness of a given human life cannot necessarily be known or felt from the vastness of an evolutionary perspective. Evolution only acquires its meaning in the context of vast time. By contrast, humans live in micro-chunks of time. And that micro-temporal existence also needs to be made meaningful. Looked at from the perspective of the entire evolutionary process, an individual being’s existence has no obvious meaning. But if reality is meaningful, that meaning must apply to individual entities, not just the entire cosmic process. As even Teilhard acknowledges, evolution operates according to large numbers and long time periods. But, as he recognized, the meaningfulness of individual entities would appear to be contradicted by the enormous waste and suffering that is part of that meaningful cosmic process.
 
All of which finally leads us to the question of: What is the meaning of a single human existence, independent of its role in a vast cosmic process of which it is unaware? Is there not a rare and precious quality to each individual manifestation of Being and Mind which exists at a specific and limited point in space and time, a meaning that can be known or sensed even in the absence of awareness of the evolutionary process?

Traditionally, in the Abrahamic traditions this was answered in beliefs such as the idea that we are all children of a benevolent fatherly God. But in a 21st century spirituality in which traditional theistic language and symbols are less and less part of how people think about spiritual reality, where does the sense of individual, personal meaning come from?

We would suggest that in a 21st century spirituality, a sense of meaning at the personal level ultimately comes from the same source that meaning in traditional theism comes from, which is to say that it does not come from any sort of rational thought process or intellectual interpretation of historical events. Rather, the sense that life has meaning is something which is sensed, or intuited, in a virtually limitless variety of specific moments of everyday, ordinary experience, where we sense that there really is something precious and meaningful about each individual conscious being (described so beautifully in the opening pages of Martin Buber’s  I and Thou). In a sense, it is a taste of something, or an awareness of something, that is accompanied by an immediate and firm impression of “so this is the way things are,” even though there is no specific, detailed, easily articulated account of exactly what is meant by “this is the way things are.”

This also suggests that meaning is not acquired solely through reasoning: meaning is not confined to a series of propositions that we can lay out in a logical sequence; like all human knowledge, it includes elements of this, but the fullness of meaning is something that we find at a deeper level of human awareness. In fact, as soon as we begin to assert that we can articulate the details of this perception of meaning, we immediately and of necessity enter into an error mode, in a sense committing a category error of trying to communicate the nature of something that cannot be communicated through the exteriorized mode of verbal expression. This sense of individual meaning, though powerful, is ineffable.  Such moments of meaning-affirmation can be found in an endless array of everyday ordinary experiences, including moral experiences of the Good (a parent’s love of a child, an act of altruism, a simple kindness extended to a stranger) or even aesthetic experiences of beauty (a sunset, the vastness of the stars on a clear night, the sound of a bird, the smell of a flower).

One could say that a 21st century sense of personal meaning, both in origin and content, is perhaps no different than a traditional theistic sense of meaning, the only difference being the language that is used to try to articulate that ineffable sense that we live in a Universe in which Goodness (despite all appearances) is ultimate, and in a Universe where our individual existence really matters (even though we cannot precisely articulate how). It may seem simplistic to some, but meaning can be boiled down to the basic assertion that reality includes Something More, existence is purposeful, and our personal existence as entities in that reality matters.
 
Some will find this account of personal meaning inadequate, given that it lacks the detail of many traditional theistic accounts, but, as we have argued previously, to the extent that 21st century spirituality will be intellectually and spiritually honest, it necessarily will be lacking in detail, as we set aside the pretense of being able to articulate that which is far beyond our ability to do so. In a sense, a 21st century awareness of meaning, like a traditional theistic affirmation of meaning, necessarily includes an element of faith, but 21st century meaningfulness is grounded in faith derived from an experiential awareness, rather than faith based on the content of an ancient text or a historical event to which one does not have proof, and hence in the context of that empirical grounding, 21st century spirituality is credible to many who no longer find the traditional ways of thinking about religion (including the idea of meaning) to be convincing.

We also must acknowledge an essential element in most religious concepts of meaning, even though we are deferring discussion of the issue for a separate post: belief in some type of preservation of the self (life-after-death, post-mortem survival, immortality, etc.).  In a universe governed by a good God or, to say essentially the same thing in less theistic terms, in a cosmos in which Spirit is the ultimate reality, does it necessarily follow that souls or individual self-aware consciousnesses should be forever annihilated and doomed to permanent extinction upon death of the physical form, but rather, as a logical and necessary expression of the fundamental Goodness of God/ Spirit, each soul/consciousness must be preserved in some dimension of existence beyond that of the material realm which we now inhabit? Many would posit that there is a direct experience of the sense that we live in a meaningful universe in which individual consciousness, or personal identity, is a precious and valuable thing, and in order for that universe to be meaningful, that consciousness must somehow be preserved. Given the importance, complexity, and subtle aspects of this issue, we will examine it in a separate post. Perhaps all that needs to be said on the topic for now is something like this: the sense, sentiment, or intuition that we do live in a meaningful universe, however poorly and vaguely that sentiment might be articulated, is accompanied by a similarly vague and poorly defined, but adamantly convincing, sense that there is some kind of preservation of individual identity or consciousness after death of the physical body which we presently inhabit on this plane of existence (much more on this subtle, complex, and existentially essential issue in a later post).
 
Meaning in 21st Century Spirituality: The Basics
 
So to conclude, yes, meaning is available in 21st century spirituality that has set aside the traditional deity, texts, doctrines, religious authority structures, etc.
 
Specifically, a spiritually meaningful life is simply a life lived in accordance with spiritual reality. There is a deeper, ultimate, Transcendent, spiritual reality, Something More than the totality of the Cosmos of matter, energy, space, and time. Our life takes on a sense that it matters, that it’s meaningful, to the degree that we live our life with primary reference to that Something More (variously referred to in religious and philosophical traditions as God, Dao, Buddha-nature, Ultimate Reality, etc.), rather than with reference to values, beliefs, wants, etc. that run counter to that Something More. And when we live a life in such a manner, what happens externally cannot negate the meaningfulness of our life, nor is our confidence in meaning dependent on awareness of a Grand Narrative. What happens externally can of course cause great pain, suffering, anxiety, disruption, heartache, destruction, etc., but it cannot negate the sense that we live in a meaningful reality. As long as we are persevering in the primacy of our relationship to the Transcendent Good, our life has meaning; as soon as we let it go – no matter what is happening historically and externally – that meaning is gone.
 
Recognizing a sense that existence has meaning in the 21st century depends only on an openness to the intuitive sense that there is a Something More, recognition of that Something More as the Supreme Good, accepting that we are inextricably connected to that ineffable Something More, and realizing that a meaningful life is simply a matter of living in accordance with that Something More.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

​The Role of Consciousness in 21st Century Spirituality
 
Consciousness, evolutionary religion, 21st century spirituality
The evolutionary spirituality model rests on the belief that human consciousness evolves, slowly and over long periods of time. That evolution of consciousness includes a slow expansion of the human species’ capacity to sense or intuit the presence of the spiritual dimension of reality, including a slowly expanding awareness of moral goodness and meaning. As such, the evolution of consciousness functions as the basis for the emergence and evolution of religion in its many manifestations.
 
The role of consciousness as the foundation of spirituality and religion becomes more prominent in our contemporary post-Axial culture, where a 21st century sensibility, which includes recognition of the historically and culturally constructed elements of religion, has led to a gradual loss of confidence in the notion that religion originates in a discrete act of top-down divine revelation. This in turn leads to a loss of confidence in the sacred texts, doctrines, and other institutional elements of traditional religion. Lacking faith in the old texts and the doctrines that flow from them, what are we left with as the basis for faith? Simply, consciousness.
 
By letting go of our attachment to the old texts, doctrines, and religious authority structures, we open up the possibility of seeing the remarkable nature of consciousness, which is always right there in front of us as the source of all awareness and the basis for the human capacity to sense that there is a “Something More” to reality than just matter, energy, space, and time. Through consciousness we are able to directly access, however dimly, the presence of a spiritual dimension to the Cosmos, including the sense of moral goodness and meaning that are inherent aspects of that spiritual dimension.
 
 
 
Unfortunately, we tend to take consciousness for granted, since it is, in one sense, quite “ordinary,” functioning as the always present basis for the mundane tasks of everyday sensory experience: seeing a rock, tasting an apple, hearing chirping birds, smelling a smoking fire, feeling the sun’s heat. Indeed, the full extent of human waking and dreaming experiences are possible only through our consciousness. As something (exactly what is a bit of a mystery) which is present with us all the time, we take it for granted rather than recognizing that it is utterly extraordinary and the necessary foundation for our capacity for spirituality.
 
More specifically, we suggest here that there are two primary ways in which consciousness functions as the foundation of religion:
1. Consciousness disproves materialism/physicalism, and hence opens up the possibility of a spiritual perspective even for those who no longer find traditional faith to be credible
2. Consciousness is the faculty through which humans have intuitive access to awareness of the transcendental realm of meaning and value – or, in other words, awareness of Spirit
 
Consciousness disproves materialism
Twentieth century thought was dominated by the uncritical acceptance of reductive materialism which naively claimed that all of reality could be explained by and reduced to a material component. In its extreme form materialists simply denied that consciousness existed (which is a rather peculiar assertion, given that it would seem to be the case that any assertion by a human is an act of consciousness, even the assertion that denies the existence of consciousness). More typically, however, consciousness was seen as nothing more than an emergent property of electro-chemical activity in the brain. From this point of view consciousness wasn’t anything special: it’s just what you get when neurons reach a certain level of complexity, as they do in the human brain.
 
But this position has been seriously challenged in both scientific and philosophical circles, as exemplified by what David Chalmers coined the “hard problem” of consciousness. Chalmers refers to the ongoing task of correlating conscious activity with brain events as the “soft problem” of consciousness. It’s a problem, in the sense that we’re still working on developing a full understanding of the neural correlates of consciousness (NCC), but it’s a “soft” problem in the sense that, in theory at least, it would seem to be the case that given sufficiently sophisticated scanning and similar medical devices, and given sufficient time to continue the research, there is good reason to believe that we will eventually be able to comprehensively understand the correlation between specific acts of consciousness and specific physical events in the brain.
 
 And yet, no matter how accurately and comprehensively we map out the NCC, we still have not explained consciousness itself. Establishing that something happens in the brain, even at the precise moment that a specific conscious event occurs, demonstrates a correlation, but it does not in any way explain what consciousness is. The nature of consciousness is so radically different than the material substance that we observe in the brain that, as Chalmers suggests, bridging the gap between brain event and consciousness event may be an impossible task, and hence the “hard problem,” in the sense of a problem that might never be solved. Put differently, the actual nature of consciousness is an experience of what it is like to be a knowing subject. We might be able to identify what’s happening in a brain when that conscious experience occurs, but in doing so we are not in any way describing the actual subjective experience itself. We are not experiencing or in even a remote way providing insight into the nature of what it is like to have that experience. This again illustrates the peculiar character of consciousness, in that not only is it the case that we at present cannot describe in scientific terms what it is like to have a conscious experience, it would seem to be the case that the very question of describing what it is like to have a conscious experience is nonsensical. Objective realities – including activity in the brain – can be described, explained, measured, etc. by an outside observer. But the actual experience of consciousness cannot be described: it can only be experienced. Paradoxically, the one thing which we know most immediately and intimately is the one thing that completely eludes scientific explanation.
 
In a certain sense, this awareness or consciousness that we all experience may seem rather mundane, precisely because of its commonness and universality. But to view consciousness as such would be an enormous mistake. When we step back and look at consciousness, we find something quite remarkable and mysterious. Consciousness, in a sense, offers us immediate empirically grounded evidence of the existence of something that is not material. Consciousness demonstrates that there is indeed “something more” than the material realm of matter and form. Consciousness demonstrates that, in this universe of such unimaginably immense spatial and temporal vastness, there is something else, and quite remarkably, that something else is part of us, perhaps even the essence of what we are. So this thing that we take for granted as we experience it day after day, moment after moment, is actually something rare, precious, and mysterious.
 
What all of this suggests is that consciousness provides a gateway to the recognition that there really is a “Something More,” beyond the deterministic realm of material reality described by science. Consciousness provides confirmation that, independent of sacred text or church doctrine, there is good reason to believe that, in a broad sense, there is a “spiritual” element to reality.
 
Consciousness provides access to the Transcendent realm of meaning and value
But consciousness provides a basis for a post-traditional spirituality in another important way: besides confirming that there is a non-physical dimension to the Cosmos, consciousness provides us with access to the nature of that spiritual reality. It is only through consciousness that humans have the capacity for awareness of various sorts of sensory experience: sights, sounds, tactile sensations, etc. But consciousness is not limited to awareness of sensory experiences. In at least one species, the human, consciousness has evolved to the point where an awareness of intangibles, or content that is not the immediate product of some sort of sensory stimulation, has become possible. Through consciousness, for example, we have an awareness of abstract concepts such as time, space, number, and other universals.
 
However, most significantly, human consciousness provides us with the capacity to gain access to awareness of supersensory spiritual qualities, such as value (moral goodness, love, empathy, justice, fairness) and meaning. As part of everyday experience, we tend to take this for granted, but here we begin to see the remarkable and unique quality of consciousness as that which allows the human species to access awareness of something that has no external, tangible, physical reality. Through consciousness, we have the capacity to intuit the presence of what, in traditional Western terms, constitutes transcendent qualities such as goodness, truth, and beauty. In the Western tradition, we see this in Plato’s forms; in Chinese thought, we see it in awareness of the indescribable but nonetheless completely real and utterly foundational Dao.
 
Of course, different religious traditions have widely varying beliefs about the specific content of this spiritual awareness, but one could argue that such differences are to be expected when one considers the epistemological challenge of a small, young species attempting to understand and articulate something of this nature. Indeed, the Perennial Philosophy school (represented by the likes of Aldous Huxley, Huston Smith, and Frithjof Schuon) posits that there is an underlying unity of what might be called intuited spiritual awareness, which only becomes diversified when humans attempt to articulate its content through specific propositional statements.
 
And so….
All of which brings us back to our initial concern: what does consciousness have to do with how we think about religion in the 21st century?
 
To the extent that consciousness both involves a sense of self and is the faculty which allows the self to access concepts of meaning and value, the connection with religion is obvious and always has been:
The specific mode of consciousness that has evolved in the human species (and perhaps elsewhere, but that’s for consideration at another time) is one that provides access to what can reasonably be designated as the spiritual dimension of the Cosmos, in the sense that human consciousness entails an intuitive awareness of, or sense that, we are in a Cosmos in which there exist, as fundamental properties, value and meaning, which are not inherently perceivable through a strictly materialist lens. There is indeed Something More than matter and energy. Religion (in its many expressions) can be seen as the human effort to make sense of and to more precisely articulate the nature of that consciously apprehended but still dim sense of Something More in which value and meaning originate.
 
Hence, with reference to our consideration of how to think about religion in the 21st century, consciousness is the starting point. Setting aside the scriptures which are no longer accepted as the supernaturally revealed word of God, setting aside the doctrines and dogma which are no longer accepted as infallible and unquestioned affirmations that derive from those texts, and setting aside the privileged status of religious authority structures which derive their power from those texts and doctrines, we are still left with a foundation for a spiritual view of reality, and that foundation is consciousness. In fact, one might say that consciousness, when fully recognized as the mysterious and sublime reality that it is, provides a much firmer foundation for a 21st century religious perspective than do sacred texts and church doctrines, in that consciousness is something we know in an immediate and irrefutable sense, whereas sacred texts and doctrines require faith in a variety of ways. In simple and stark terms, consciousness is the 21st century starting point for a spiritual view of reality.

In our previous post, we observed that expansion of our sense of moral responsibility beyond the human realm is found not only in the evolving 21st century spirituality, but also in some expressions of past religious and philosophical traditions. Of particular note is the Neo-Confucian tradition, which unfortunately is often overlooked in accounts of the world’s major spiritual and philosophical traditions.
 
Neo-Confucianism took the moral philosophy of Confucius (who avoided metaphysical and religious speculation) and gave it a cosmic scope, asserting that human ethical behavior constitutes an extension of moral quality (particularly ren) into the Universe (or in Confucian terms, into Heaven, Earth, and Humanity).
 
This extension of moral responsibility beyond the human is intimately related to a corollary assertion of the inter-connectedness of all realms of the Cosmos. Humans do not exist as isolated beings, but rather as a part of a Cosmos of inter-connected entities of varying degrees of consciousness and moral awareness.
 
This sense of the human connection to a larger reality is beautifully described by the 11th century Neo-Confucian Zhang Zai (Chang Tsai) in the beginning of his classic work, The Western Inscription:
 
Heaven is my father and Earth is my mother, and even such a small creature as I finds an intimate place in their midst.
Therefore that which fills the universe I regard as my body and that which directs the universe I consider as my nature.
All people are my brothers and sisters, and all things are my companions.
 
Carrying this sense of inter-connected reality to its logical moral conclusion that, as part of a larger reality, we have moral empathy for and responsibilities that extend to that larger reality of which we are a part, is Wang Yangming’s (15th to 16th c.) touching description of the enlightened sage as one who feels moral empathy for humans, non-human living beings, and even inanimate objects:
 
When he observes the pitiful cries and frightened appearance of birds and animals about to be slaughtered, he cannot help feeling an inability to bear their suffering. This shows that his humanity forms one body with birds and animals.
It may be objected that birds and animals are sentient beings as he is. But when he sees plants broken and destroyed, he cannot help a feeling of pity. This shows that his humanity forms one body with plants.
It may be said that plants are living things as he is. Yet even when he sees tiles and stones shattered and crushed, he cannot help a feeling of regret. This shows that his humanity forms one body with tiles and stones…..
 
Everything from ruler, minister, husband, wife, and friends to mountains, rivers, spiritual beings, birds, animals, and plants should be truly loved in order to realize my humanity that forms one body with them. 
 
(translations by Wing-tsit Chan, A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy)
 
Contemporary cosmology, evolutionary theory, the emerging field of Big History, and even quantum theory all assert that humans are not isolated entities but rather part of a larger interconnected whole, and from this insight comes a sense of moral responsibility that expands beyond the human to all sentient beings and even the entire Universe. As this expanded sense of moral responsibility continues to develop in the 21st century and beyond, we can look back to Zhang Zai, Wang Yangming, and others in the Neo-Confucian tradition as an important historical source of this sense of cosmic ethical responsibility.
 

What will the human sense of moral responsibility look like as we move into a post-Axial 21st century spirituality? As consciousness evolves and generates a greater awareness of the inter-connectedness of all being, how will that consciousness impact spirituality and the sense of moral responsibility toward other beings?
 
If we look at the long term, big picture evolution of human morality, we see a gradual expansion of our sense of moral obligation, from family to tribe to village to larger political units such as states and nations. What, then, will be the next step in what has so far been an ever-expanding sense of human moral responsibility (found, of course, only sporadically, and practiced by only a few even while the usual human brutality continues all around them)? What will morality in a post-Axial Age, 21st century spirituality look like?
 
First, our sense of spiritually-grounded moral obligation likely will extend to the entire human species, not just to one’s “own” group, whether that be a specific religion, nation, ethnic group, or whatever. For many contemporary believers, that sense of moral obligation has already been extended to its maximum breadth within the human community through a sense of moral obligation to all humans, regardless of religion, ethnicity, race, gender, nationality, etc. The notion of a “brotherhood (or sisterhood) of man (or humanity)” is hardly a new idea, and its origins can be seen even in the teachings of Axial Age traditions (Jesus extending the sense of moral obligation beyond his Jewish followers to the Gentiles, the Buddha teaching the importance of extending compassion and other moral virtues to people of all castes).
 
 In real life, of course, this sense of a moral commitment to the entire species is often forgotten and sullied by its confused connection with various forms of religious exclusivism (moral obligations only to fellow true believers), nationalism (moral obligation only to God’s chosen nation), and similar limiting perspectives. Nonetheless, over the course of the 20th century, and especially among the post-Baby Boomer generation that has grown up with a previously unknown global ecological awareness and more informed recognition of the consequences of many aspects of modern human technologies, we find that a sense of community with the entire human species is more and more the norm rather than the exception. Such a trend is likely to continue, and the moral teachings of the religion of the future likely will reflect this sense of the need to treat all of humanity in a virtuous manner.
 
But we would suggest that there are also signs that the expansion of our sense of moral responsibility is already extending even beyond the human species and evolving into a sense of moral responsibility to all living beings.
 
The extension of moral responsibility beyond the human realm is, of course, a value  occasionally found even in the ancient Axial Age tradition, as for example in the non-violence of Jainism, in the vegetarianism of Plotinus, in the neo-Confucian cosmicized vision of li and ren in Zhang Zai’s Western Inscription, and elsewhere.
 
In contemporary moral philosophy, the ethicist Peter Singer has coined the term “speciesism” to describe and criticize the traditional approach to morality in which we treat one species (human) as more deserving of moral consideration than other species, whether plant or animal. Singer argues that speciesism, like racism and sexism, are relics of a morality which humanity is growing out of. We already see the early signs of the emergence of what might be called a “trans-human” or “trans-species” morality in the growth of vegetarianism and veganism (growing to the point that even fast-food restaurant chains now offer plant-based alternatives to beef and chicken) and the growing popularity of organizations and movements devoted to natural conservation, environmental protection, and ethical treatment of animals. One might speculate that given these trends, just as today’s believers look back critically at earlier religious moralities that were confined to one’s own tribe and considered sexist and racist behavior as morally acceptable, in the future spiritually mature believers might someday look back at today’s speciesist morality as similarly primitive and brutal.
 
This movement toward a trans-species global ethic is referenced by Ervin Laszlo, who sees the evolutionary development of the human species as heading into a post-Axial Age in which human consciousness will become more attuned to our trans-species connections, and consequently a similarly expanded ethic will eventually develop. As our concept of God/Spirit/the Sacred expands, so will our sense of ethical responsibility:
 
When people evolve transpersonal consciousness they become aware of their deep ties to each other, to the biosphere, and to the cosmos. They develop greater empathy with people and cultures near and far and greater sensitivity to animals, plants, and the entire biosphere (Laszlo, Quantum Shift in the Global Brain, 125)
 
This will be problematic for those who cling to Axial religions and their less expansive moral teachings, and as with the basic beliefs as discussed in previous posts, it will take a very long time (as evolution always does) to develop a more defined set of post-Axial moral principles. But whatever form those principles take is sure to be one which will reflect a moral commitment on a global, planetary, trans-species scale, covering not only humans, but all sentient beings.
 
 
 
 
 

 
                             Aurobindo
 
In one of the more peculiar coincidences in the world of 20th century religious and philosophical thought, at the same time that the French priest Teilhard de Chardin was developing his evolutionary model of religion, the Indian revolutionary-turned-Hindu Vedanta yogi Aurobindo Ghose was developing a remarkably similar model in India, each without knowledge of the other’s work. Each was familiar with the story of biological evolution as developed by Darwin, and each created a model in which biological evolution was extended to the evolution of consciousness and hence also to what they both saw as an emerging future spirituality. There is no evidence to suggest that Aurobindo knew anything about Teilhard’s work (which is to be expected, given that the Catholic Church suppressed the publication of his philosophical and religious works), and there is only a brief account of Teilhard, late in his life, reading part of Aurobindo’s Life Divine and commenting that it appeared to be essentially an Asian version of his own ideas.
 
Born in 1872, Aurobindo Ghose (Shri Aurobindo to his followers) lived most of his life in India, until his death in 1950. His only noteworthy travel outside India was for a university education at Cambridge, where he was exposed to not only Darwin’s work on biological evolution but also earlier proponents of cultural evolution such as Hegel and Bergson. As a devout Hindu, Aurobindo was also familiar with the extensive Hindu philosophical tradition, from the early Vedas and Upanishads to the Vedantic philosophers such as Shankara and Ramanuja.
 
After returning to India, Aurobindo became a prominent figure in the political resistance movement against British rule, ultimately leading to his arrest and imprisonment on terrorist charges. During his solitary confinement in prison, Aurobindo had a profound religious experience which eventually led him to move away from political life and toward a semi-reclusive life as a spiritual seeker and philosopher.
 
Establishing an ashram in Pondicherry, and engaging in prolonged periods of solitude for the rest of his life, Aurobindo created an enormous opus of evolutionary spirituality, including the classics The Life Divine (1,130 pages in the English edition) and The Synthesis of Yoga (918 pages). In these and other works Aurobindo developed a sophisticated interpretation of a modernized Vedanta which was world-affirming, compatible with science, and evolutionary.
 
At times Aurobindo's works, despite being composed in English, can be dense and ambiguous, partly the product of his effort to describe such a novel vision for which there was little precedent (other than, perhaps, in the work of his unknown contemporary, Teilhard), and partly due to his occasional use of sometimes non-traditional translations of Sanskrit words from ancient Hindu texts. Aurobindo might have written in English, but it sometimes seems as if he is thinking in Sanskrit.
 
Like Teilhard, Aurobindo constructs a model which is empirically grounded in a scientific understanding of the evolution of the Cosmos. While both Teilhard and Aurobindo value the scriptural texts of their respective traditions of Christianity and Hinduism, neither sees their model as grounded in or dependent on sacred texts, doctrines, or other religious traditions. Both Teilhard and Aurobindo sprinkle passages from sacred texts throughout their writings, but always in the context of supporting observations that are rooted in empiricism, not the text.
 
Aurobindo, working from an emanationist model which although grounded in science also has ancient roots in the Upanishads, sees the Cosmos as an unfolding evolutionary process of God/Brahman/Spirit emanating the material Universe (involution) and the long history of the Universe as the gradual restoration of awareness of its true spiritual source and nature (evolution). Similar to Teilhard, Aurobindo sees evolution as proceeding from matter to life to mind/consciousness. In Teilhard’s thought, the next step in the evolution of consciousness and the transformation of the human species is the Omega Point, which he variously and ambiguously characterizes as both God and the final stage of cosmic and human evolution. Similarly, Aurobindo posits an evolution of human consciousness into future stages of the Overmind and, in the culmination of evolution, the Supermind. As with Teilhard, Aurobindo’s account of these higher stages of the evolution of consciousness and their relationship (perhaps identity) with God/Brahman/Spirit can be somewhat vague and dense. And yet, considering that both Teilhard and Aurobindo attempt to articulate something that, in one sense at least, is not yet fully existent, such absence of clarity should not be surprising.
 
One significant difference between Aurobindo and most of his predecessors in the Hindu Vedanta tradition is his positive evaluation of the material world. Aurobindo strongly objects to what is perhaps the dominant Vedantic position, defended by Shankara, that sees the material world as an illusion and advocates an ascetic denial of the value of this world. In his affirmation of this world as the emanated presence of the divine, Aurobindo shares with Teilhard a world-affirming perspective of the Cosmos, along with the recognition that it is an unfinished Cosmos that has yet to reach its evolutionary goal.
 
Aurobindo and Teilhard have many critics in both the scientific and spiritual communities, and we hope to explore some of these criticisms in later posts. Nonetheless, both are certain to remain seminal figures in the development of a 21st century post-Axial spirituality which will, of necessity, be grounded in an evolutionary, rather than static, understanding of the Cosmos and all that emerges in it, including consciousness and religion.
 
[Note: For those who wish to further explore Aurobindo’s thought, see The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga. However, given the difficulty of these works, a more accessible starting point would be Satprem’s Sri Aurobindo: The Adventure of Consciousness or The Future Evolution of Man, a nicely organized anthology of passages from Aurobindo’s major works.
For a comparative exploration of Teilhard and Aurobindo, see R.C. Zaehner’s Evolution and Religion: A Study in Sri Aurobindo and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Given some of his biases, Zaehner is not for everybody, but overall he offers a useful comparison of these two comparable but by no means identical expressions of evolutionary spirituality.]