Spirituality, Humility and Evolution.

...From her sweet couch up starts the widow'd bride,
Her lord's loved image rushing on her soul,
Throws the rich ornaments of youth aside,
And gives her griefs to flow without control.

--Homer

 "Anticipating a unity of nations that was not to become even a tentative reality until the birth of United Nations in 1944 in San Fransico, Aeschylus describes the mortal enemies, Greece and Persia, as "sisters of one race...flawless in beauty and grace." 

--Spiritual Evolution
A Scientific Defense of Faith
By: George E. Valliant, M.D.


Near the beginning of the fall of 2011, I was slowly looking around "Garden Ridge" for some Halloween decorations with my kids.

While looking at the piles of books that they have set up haphazardly on enormous tables, I had the fortunate opportunity of stumbling across the book mentioned above and it completely intrigued me. Although I am a firm believer in God and Christ, I have, on numerous occasions, talked in length with my mom about religion and spirituality. 

What ties us together in our humanity? The Great Spirit in Native American cultures, Asian religions and styles of belief systems, Judaism and others are all so different ideologically, so what was it that spiritually drew us together. If God made everything in the world, then why do we so easily harken to division?

In fact, one of the greatest things I learned from my family was having #Gratitude. Gratitude for what we did have, and gratitude for what we didn't.  

During the twelve centuries between 600 BCE and 700 CD, the spiritual sages and prophets developed cognitive insights and emotional rituals that utilized inborn positive limbic emotions to to counter aggression. The empathic practices of the world's great religions served to mitigate the equally hardwired xenophobia and territoriality that is largely responsible for tribal violence.

Karen Armstrong, a former nun and master of autobiography, is one of the foremost teachers of comparative religion alive today. In her magisterial The Great Transformation, following the 1948 lead of German philosopher Karl Jaspers, Armstrong has titled this period the Axial Age. She sets its dates a little earlier (900-200 BCE) than I do, but her melody is the same. In Armstrong's words, "The Axial Age pushed forward the frontiers of human consciousness and discovered a transcendent dimension in the core of their being, but they did not regard this as supernatural...if the Buddha or Confucius had been asked whether he believed in God, he would probably have winced slightly and explained--with great courtesy--that this was not an appropriate question." What mattered to Confucius, Socrates, Christ, and Isaiah was not what you believed but how you behaved. Show me, don't tell me. "God" was the experience of loving compassion, not an all-powerful, judgmental, and often angry patriarch.

For evolving humanity, the Axial Age also reflected what the Swiss-French developmentalist Jean Piaget was later to call "formal operations." Without formal operations (defined as the capacity to abstract general principles from concrete observations), neither science nor mature morality would be possible. Religions needed to look beyond the letter of law and to distinguish between metaphor and myth. In addition, through disciplined introspection humanity was awakened to the vast reaches of self-hood that lay beneath the surface of their minds. Humanity became fully "self-conscious" The tragedy of fundamentalist religion of all shades and stripes is that it reasons concretely like a third grader, not a tenth-grader.

In his 1990 book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, Princeton psychologist Julian Jaynes observed, perhaps too romantically, that the fifth century BCE brought a shift from humans depending upon moral comments from without--the burning bush of Moses and the hallucination of gods' voices in Homer's Illiad--to a world in which morality and responsibility came from within, owing to responsible introspection. Instead of being consigned to Mount Olympus and to Heaven, God could reside within us all.

Instead of conceptualizing gods like the Greek and Aztec deities who, like reptiles, devoured their young (consider Cronus), the culturally evolved fifth-century BCE humans conceived of models like Socrates, the Buddha, and later Christ, who epitomized unselfish love and inspired us to emulate them. During that transformative millenium, the range of people whom a given person felt compelled to regard as equally human greatly expanded. "Tribes" became integrated into empires--a process culminating in both Roman Europe and Chinese Asia. Once the xenophobic, tribal Romans learned to regard millions of "barbarians" as "citizens" not only cities but empires became viable. Today the challenge still remains for Jews, Christians, Hindus, and Muslims to regard one another as fully human. The cultural invention of the Internet may be a step forward.

I loved the idea that we are all tied together, that we all do matter in this "big story" and in humanity's step forward. That we care about each other. That my atheists friends are right. My Muslim friends are right. That my Christian friends are right. That we are ALL right.

"Even since the Enlightenment, underneath our rational, postmodern, sophisticated radar screen, human spirituality has continued to evolve culturally. Alfred Nobel grew rich selling the world explosives; his descendants are today as invisible as the ruins of the first Troy. Only Nobel's spiritual legacy of prizes for beauty, truth, and peace live on. You do not have to go back very far in time to find and era when the plague of intertribal wars that afflict Africa today afflicted the entire globe. Over the past two thousand years, larger and larger groups of ethnically diverse people have learned to live together cooperatively. From the unification of China after the chaos of "the Warring States" two millennia

So, my appreciation to all who have provided streams of information and articles to those of us who have focused solely on matters of the heart. We need each other to survive, we need each other to teach, we need each other to supplement that with which we lack. We can't stand as an independent leader, because we are all leaders. We all rise and we all fall. For some, our dogmatic ideology stands as a source of judgement, but for others, our love of self, and our understanding of life and spirituality allows us to transcend those systems of ideological constraint by understanding independently the responsibility in our lives that we have to others that we love.

We are people, we have souls, we are humbled, we care, we love, we cry, we mourn. We feel...because we exist together.