The Evolutionary Hump

I have come to realize there is an evolutionary hump that we as individuals, as a society, and as a species need to get over if we are going to continue into the future.

Does Natural Evolution Stop With Humans?

I used to think there was a natural evolutionary urge that pushes us forward into growth and development, but now I’m not so sure. I do understand that progress in evolution is not necessarily continuous.  There are regressions thrown into the mix, but now I’m wondering if there is a point when human evolution just stops occurring naturally.

We see this evolutionary urge pushing creation from the Big Bang, some 13.8 billion years ago, to the emergence of humans, but once the universe creates self-conscious humans with free will, does this evolutionary push still operate? Humans can simply reject, ignore or simply lose touch with this evolutionary urge, as most people are currently doing.

This urge is something more akin to the Tao in Taoism that is constantly pushing living things to be what they are by nature. The evolutionary urge is something one must experience inwardly, but the problem is most modern humans aren’t inner, but outer focused.

So, how do we get back in touch with these buried aspects of ourselves?

 Class Conflict/Climate Change as Motivating Human Evolution?

Will it happen naturally? Karl Marx saw class conflict as the motivating force that propelled humanity though his five stages of history. He believed that as outer situations (economics/technology) change, human consciousness would also change to meet and deal with the changing economic conditions.

That’s still a possibility. When life gets too difficult for the vast majority of people, they will rebel and demand change, heralding in the next stage of evolution.

In my book I made climate change the issue that would eventually wake people up. The problem with climate change is that unless we are directly experiencing it, and for an extended period of time, we don’t think much about it.

But, as we are seeing now, as it gets worse and affects more people, more people are taking notice. If enough of us do that, then we can demand a fundamental transformation of our economic and energy systems to meet this existential crisis.

But, how bad does it have to get before this will happen? How long will it take for people to transform themselves?  Because, as the saying goes,

“We can’t solve a problem from the same mentality that created it”

While a growing number of people are realizing this, it’s not happening fast enough.

George Gurdjieff : Humans Must Choose to Evolve

To get another perspective on what’s holding us back from taking the next evolutionary step, I went back and reread some of my old Gurdjieff and P.D. Ouspensky books. George Gurdjieff was a Russian philosopher, mystic, and spiritual teacher. Ouspensky was a teacher of esoteric doctrines.  They came up with seven categories of human development.

Their first three categories all exist on the same level. Each category just emphasizes different aspects of the three basic centers of human nature which they called: the instinctive, the feeling and the thinking. These three centers operate in all humans, but for those embedded in the first three categories, they make up the entire person.

The first category is the instinctive. Most people at this level operate from this category. This person is dominated by their body, instincts, physical habits, and sex. Material considerations take precedence in any decision making. It’s not that their feeling or thinking centers don’t operate, it’s more that the instinctive center takes precedence.

The second category is dominated by emotions and feelings and they take precedence over the instinctive and thinking centers. At the extreme, this person can be prone to emotional outbursts, exaggeration, and irrationality. The real mark, however, is that of trusting feelings over material considerations or abstract ideas.

The third category is dominated by the thinking center which takes precedence over the instinctive and the feeling centers. This category holds the fewest number of people at this level. This person is logical and likes to reduce issues to yes/no or agree/disagree dichotomies. They often lack feeling and tend toward abstraction.

Human are Machines or Automatons in First Three Categories 

Gurdjieff maintains that humanity naturally evolves to one of these three categories. He calls people at this level, contemporary people or human-machines. He believes that the vast majority of people we meet in life will be at this level.

For Gurdjieff, these people are little more than machines. They are run by outside stimuli and inner programming. They may think that they are making free choices, but that’s because they aren’t yet aware of their own programming, and very likely never will be.

Need Conscious Effort to Evolve Further

Gurdjieff stipulates that if any further development is to occur beyond these three basic categories, humans will have to consciously make the effort to do so. It won’t happen naturally.

Levels four through seven are the progressively higher stages of consciousness that humans can reach, but only through conscious effort. Humans have to consciously choose to develop themselves, otherwise they will languish in ignorance in their caves like Plato’s prisoners in his Allegory of the Cave.

Immortality Is Our Choice

Gurdjieff maintains that people are not by nature, immortal, but we do have supernatural potentials embedded in us to attain immortality. However, we have to consciously actualize them, otherwise when we die, that will be it.

This makes a lot of sense to me. We do have free will and can make the conscious choice to develop ourselves, but it’s no longer a natural part of our evolution.

Gurdjieff’s Contradiction?

However, there does seem to be a contradiction here. Gurdjieff says humans at the lowest level are automatons with no free will, yet, in order to develop, we have to consciously make that choice. How does that work?

In order to break through that paradox, something very powerful would have to happen to an individual that affected them at the very core of their being. It could be the loss of a loved one, loss of a job, or a life threatening illness. Anything where the old way of being would no longer suffice.

Perhaps economic conditions and/or climate change when they become bad enough will force people to make that conscious effort to evolve.

Unfortunately, it also seems these difficult times are driving a number of people into believing every crazy idea or conspiracy theory that comes around. They give easy answers and somebody or something to blame for all their problems.

It feels like we are at an evolutionary hump that we need to get over if we are going to continue our sojourn on this planet.

We Caused Our Current Crisis, Not the Universe

The universe, as I show in my book, has been through many major crises that could have stopped evolution dead in its tracks, but the universe always found a way to evolve out of them.

However, the universe did not create this crisis, we did, so the universe can’t evolve its way out without the aid of humans.

So we need to make a conscious choice to evolve ourselves over our evolutionary hump and work with the universe to create the next evolutionary leap. The clock is ticking.

 

Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash

To learn more about the magic of the universe: Click this link: The Magical Universe.