On spiritual evolution – Lent 2024, Day three

Science has brought us great benefits, be it in healthcare, comfortable living, freedom from want, and physical and informational communication that eradicates distance. 

But that same science has also removed the magic from our lives. Because science works, there's no more need for spirituality. "God is dead", as Nietzsche put it in 1885. Who needs God if you have steam engines, telegraphy, weaving machines, newspapers and hygiene? And since Nietzsche died, everything newer that has come to materially enrich our lives, from the automobile to central heating and the refrigerator.

If there is no God, then what replaces God is matter. If it's all there is, we worship it, chase it, and define human success in terms of who accumulates the most of it, or its proxy, cash.

Matter has squeezed out the metaphysical, the supernatural, the paranormal. Everything is cause and effect. Billiard balls rolling across the baize knocking each other into corner pockets. There can be, argue rationalists, no effect without a cause. Magic, being defined as being a physical effect (a glass sliding across a table on its own, or a brain receiving information from the future) without a physical cause. No magic, no God, no life eternal.

But ponder for a second – to what extent was the life of pre-Columban Native American tribes qualitatively worse than the lives of citizens living in the suburbs of Minnesota, Omaha, Wichita or Milwaukee after those indigenous peoples were swept from the Great Plains? Yes, cars, hospitals, supermarkets, department stores – but also depression, hypertension, cancers, substance abuse and anxiety. Caused by a disconnect between the human spirit and the Cosmos, which was not the case for Native Americans, who were bound to the Earth and the sky in a mystical connection. The rain dance, performed by Navajo and Hopi peoples, is an excellent example. [Rain modification rituals were common around the world in shamanic traditions.]

I recently considered an alternative scenario for human development in which spiritual rather than material progress defines human evolution. (I would stress here 'spiritual' rather than 'theological' or 'religious'.)

Let's imagine for a second that the development of agriculture never happened (about 12,000 years ago), but that we humans continued to exist purely as hunter-gatherers, as we had done ever since Homo sapiens emerged as a distinct species some 400,000 years ago. Without agricultural settlements, nomadic tribes would have continued to roam, as they did across the Great Plains, with their shamanic practices developing in sophistication and effectiveness over time. 

Given not 12,000 years, but say another 120,000 years of human evolution in hunter-gatherer form. Why not a million years? Never settling down, continuing to roam the savanna, the veldt, the steppes and the plains, evolution might have selected not for the ability to dominate other humans, but for the ability to see into the future or to alter the physical environment. And with cooperation proving evolutionarily more useful than conflict, would natural selection have preferred the ethical to the Machiavellian? Open to intuition, developing in precognition, remote viewing, weather modification, ability to heal – evolving powers of mind over matter?

These abilities might be weak and found rarely in mere handfuls of gifted individuals – but just imagine evolutionary selection on the basis of psychic powers. Tribes feted shamans who could lead them to good hunting grounds and lands rich in berries, mushrooms and edible roots. Tapping into a deeper, non-local consciousness, aligning ones' needs with those of the environment and Cosmos, developing that power of mind over matter over millennia –

And then – and only then – develop agriculture, settlement, cities, industry, technology, space exploration... with a higher awareness, pin-sharp intuition, guidance from above as it were – angelic beings, but with naturally, not technologically, derived magic abilities.

But …what if they are here …already?

Lent 2023: Day three
The Nature of Reality, Pt II

Lent 2022: Day three
Gratitude and Consciousness

Lent 2021: Day three
Would the Universe exist without us?

Lent 2020: Day three
Define your Deity