06.20.10

Andrew Cohen’s muddle over the ‘evolutionary’

Posted in General at 1:46 pm by nemo

Enlightennext magazine in endless issues peddles the idea of the ‘evolutionary’, and the connection between ‘evolution’ and the ‘path to enlightenment’. About once every few months I try to scotch this confusion, not created, but amplified, by Cohen, who seems confused about spiritual teachings in general. He is a strange manufactured pseudo-guru with no spiritual practice who is running on empty after the interacton with an Indian yogi who must have pointed his shakipat ray gun in the wrong direction and zapped Cohen by mistake.

To say that ‘spiritual practice’ is a form of evolution is, in some ways, understandable, since we naturally tend to think we ‘evolved’ our consciousness somehow. But the promotion of a spiritual path as evolution, and this promoted by a guru who is self-interested in the equation, financially and organizationally, is sly, and possibly dishonest. In fairness the confusion has sourced elsewhere long ago, and we can see the confusion already in Blavatsky.
Evolution brings complexity into time at the species level (although Darwinists wouldn’t agree necessarily), while the path of enlightenment is the process whereby an individual proceeds beyond time, and rebirth cycles. (Leaving alone the really hard question of how man evolved that potential)Of course, you might think that ‘evolution’ might bring into being an organism with a different potential for consciousness. But as Gurdjieff noted, ‘consciousness’ tends to flee such mechanical achievements. The issue is to produce ‘self-consciousness’ through the tools already given by nature. Note the ordinary confusion over and equation of consciousness and self-consciousness. Man’s mechanical consciousness arises as function of birth and organism, with a dose of self-consciousness given by his powers of attention. Beyond that his behavior is mechanical, until the will awakens, whatever that means.

To confuse the two, spiritual practice and evolution, is a modern fallacy, for the word ‘evolution’ in the modern sense didn’t exist in ancient times, and wasn’t used to describe spiritual paths. Correct me if you disagree and have some counter-facts.

Also note the way that the term ‘evolutionary’ is a crypto-rightwing piece of invented verbiage to counter the term ‘revolutionary’. Suck up to Andrew Cohen, an pay your monthly asskissing tithe and may be you will evolve.
Bullshit.

Again, it might be the case that man is ‘evolving’ toward a greater awareness complete with psychic extensions to his current state. That would not be Darwinian evolution, and would imply directionality and some kind of teleology in the stages of ‘man’s evolution’. Could be so, but it wouldn’t follow that individual effort here would be the same as species level emergentism.

Perhaps man is evolving with respect to consciousness. I am not in the position to deny it. But most New Age thinking here is confused. I doubt this New Age mythology is correct.

The strange case with man is that he has all the pieces in his kit to do all that from scratch, as he is. He doesn’t need to evolve that because then it would be a mechanical appendage to his organism, of no value for the development of consciousness. It is nonetheless true that man has a poor percentage here and rarely achieves his potential. To evolve to a better starting point that made these things easier can’t be ruled out, but it is not likely: man is already there, so to speak. He just needs to activate his freedom to be who he is already. You can’t sell fire. You sell matches.

Still, the confusion here is not surprising, but beware of gurus who think they understand evolution. They don’t.
Note that Gautama began to sense the Axial Age but couldn’t quite make it out, not surprising. The ‘evolution’ on the species level of religion and the spiritual paths of individuals intersect in the spectacular Axial Age phenomenon, but they are not the same.
You can see the difference there between individuals, and groups of individual, complete with gurus, buddhas. But the period of the so-called Axial Age was far larger in scope, and was ‘evolving’ civilization at a macro level.

Gautama thus by inference could not understand how man had evolved his ‘consciousness’. The point is obvious, and alarming. But the issue is inevitable, ‘evolution’ is a process of prodigious scope stretching over billions of years. And the complexities of organisms, and their potentials for consciousness couldn’t be unraveled by a man in the age in which Gautama lived. By inference the same would still be true of our time.

For example, ….
Noone can grasp how man evolved from homo erectus to homo sapiens, most probably the canonical case of evolution that had a by product of so-called spiritual evolution, i.e. an increase in consciousness AND one that became a mechanical product, up to a point, of the organism. Note the catch.
But we have no idea how that happened, or, in fact, what happened.
I can’t rule out that a kind ‘evolution agent’ appeared like an avatar to guide human evolution here, as some have said, protesting that the term ‘evolution’ breaks down at this point. They may be right, but most probably wrong here also. Buddha was such an avatar (a Hindu word that has turned into junk thinking, so also unusable finally) in the sense that his appearance seems strangely timed to the revolution of ages we called the Axial Age, but he couldn’t produce evolution in the true sense any more than he could control cosmic forces. His basic message, btw, wasn’t evolutionary, but started with the First Noble Truth: the whole mess is a huge mistake. So goodbye to all that. Adios.

I don’t know. period. Noone else does either. And to promote the idea that you are guiding evolution here with New Age muddle is a disservice.
Unless these ‘gurus’ can speak there to that they have few grounds to claim knowledge of evolution. (I should note the discussions at The Gurdjieff Con of J.G. Bennett’s borderline wacko science fiction speculations there: the task required the gift of consciousness from beings beyond the body level of organism. In his scheme ‘consciousness’ is a cosmic energy that doesn’t interact easily with the life energies of the organism).

The term ‘evolution’, btw, is not present in the Yoga sutras. What sanskrit words were mistranslated into the word ‘evolution’?
Check out that text, without modern embroidery.
Again, noone has a monopoly on the term ‘evolutionary’. That some should make this ‘mistake’ after essentially redefining the semantics of the word would is not something I could forbit, since it would mean I am a central authority on other people’s verbiage. That I am not. So this new usage is not something I can absolutely negate. But I should note that this usage arises from confusion, not clarity.

Permalink