Let’s tentatively accept the premise that there’s an intrinsic intent in evolution (without implying a deity) to develop brains with the capacity to consciously commune with cosmic mind that infuses the universe.
Presuming the human brain has this potential, why is it so hard and rare to awaken it? Illumination is much more rare than New Agers and Western Buddhists believe.
If we didn’t have the potential as a species to awaken, then no individual would have it, unless that individual was a freak.
That would mean that humans as a rule don’t actually have the capacity to awaken intelligence, and that the brain needs further evolutionary development (without implying genetic engineering) to have it.
But that doesn’t wash, because clearly there has been, throughout history, some percentage of people who could awaken so-called mystical or samadhi states.
Let’s call it ‘the state of insight.’ The awakening of states of insight is essentially the same across cultures and time, and it cuts below language, tradition and conditioning.
So why hasn’t that capacity emerged before now, and can it emerge now?
We humans are a stubborn species. Indeed, we often crossover into pigheaded territory. If potentially intelligent life is scattered throughout the universe, apparently Homo sap is an example of a species that doesn’t make the transition of transmutation until the last chance to do so, if then.
So is that is the reason that even partial illumination has been so rare?
How would you define ‘human nature?’ How we see human nature forms the core of our worldview.
For most people, human nature is based on self-interest, whether of individuals or nations. From this basic premise, many Americans, including and embodied by our infamous president, see human nature as a tooth and claw struggle to dominate, surpass and “win.”
For others, mostly of the progressive persuasion, human nature is a totally malleable thing, which changes according to the age and culture, and is shaped by education and knowledge.
This latter-day Rousseauian view doesn’t hold up because it upholds conditioning. It still views conditioning as both inevitable and necessary, making the nonsensical distinction between good conditioning and bad conditioning (like good propaganda vs. bad propaganda).
My own view of human nature is that we humans have been highly conditionable creatures now stuck in a dangerously arrested stage of development. Moreover, the idolization of technology is reinforcing our condition of conditionability.
Put another way, we are animals possessing conscious, symbolic thought. However we can, and now must if we are to survive and thrive as individuals and a species, grow into beings of insight.
All told, we cannot begin to realize the cosmic intent lying dormant within us until we see conditioning as the false, destructive and unnecessary thing it is.
Humans live in terms of conditioning; human beings do not. Moreover, the human being endeavors not to condition his and her children.
Awakening insight is the true alternative to our present course. Everything else is recycled history, the cumulative, suffocating detritus of man’s past.
Truly, history as we’ve known it has come to an end. From now on the computers will record what’s necessary, and human beings will erase what unnecessary—psychological memory—or computers will effectively erase us, by making humans inferior entities to the thought-replication machines we’ve created.
With the movement of negation of thought, spaces and silences open up in the mind and heart, and the most complex brain the cosmos has evolved on this planet begins to realize its true potential, and
participate in the unfolding intelligence of the universe.
Martin LeFevre
