In a 1974 song, Stevie Wonder says, “They say that heaven is 10 zillion light years away” and asks what’s taking God so long. The reply is, “[I]t’s taken Him so long / ‘Cause we’ve got so far to come…” (from “Fulfillingness’ First Finale”). It is a musical truth about the nature of evolution. In terms of geological time, it hasn’t been that long since dinosaurs were the dominant—and most intelligent—life on the planet. Humans are relative newcomers; and humans who speak in sentences, write long books, and play video games are the newest of the new. We like to think of ourselves as highly evolved, but most human behavior remains influenced—if not driven—by dinosaur politics.
Most readers of this blog will already be familiar with Steve Karpman’s concept of the Drama Triangle, which defines the roles of Victim, Persecutor, and Rescuer. This is probably a step up from dinosaur politics, which probably had just two roles: Victim (the Eaten) and Persecutor (the Eater). The Drama Triangle originates in infancy. From the perspective of the infant, parents are good or bad based on meeting the infant’s needs for survival. Because infants have no way to tell time, feelings of discomfort seem to last “forever,” and feelings of comfort become “timeless” bliss. The parent who is slow to end the discomfort becomes the Persecutor, while the parent who ends the discomfort is the Rescuer.
Most humans throughout history have rotated through these roles in revolving-door fashion. During the early stages of the next step in human evolution, the Cognitive Triangle (Healing with Language: Your Key to Effective Mind-Body Communication, by Bowman and Basham), the principal functions—Imagination, Authority/Law, and Knowledge—serve to support the roles of the Drama Triangle. The Persecutor still persecutes but now uses authority (inherited, elected, or earned on the battlefield) and law to justify the persecution.
Fueled by Imagination and supported by Knowledge, a vision of a Transrational realm, which Debra and I refer to as a pyramid because roles have fallen away, emerges. It does not, however, happen overnight or all at once. The evolution of human consciousness doesn’t happen by leaps and bounds but in what Ken Wilber has called “waves and streams” (see One Taste).
One of the questions I have been pondering is how evolved a person has to be before he or she recognizes the need for and desires greater evolution? My sense is that, just as a person needs to be fairly intelligent before recognizing superior intelligence in someone else, people need to be relatively highly evolved before they can accept the idea that greater evolution is possible. My guess is that when T-Rexes gathered for group dinners, they probably congratulated themselves for being the Crown of Creation. How could they have known that some other species might end up being a more intelligent predator?
The degree to which one might be evolved is even more difficult to measure than intelligence. It is even harder to tell to what degree intelligence might be a factor in evolution. I tend to think that the two are related, but I can also think of quite a few exceptions. Hitler, for example, was a pretty bright guy, but the epigenes influencing the “evolved” part of his DNA (see my blog from 9 September) evidently never got turned on. Hitler thought that he was going to create a highly evolved “master-race,” but his idea of evolution certainly wasn’t the same as mine.
I have wondered exactly what individuals could do to further their own evolution. What would being more evolved look like, sound like, feel like? If you set a goal to further your own evolution, what would you do to achieve it? How would you know when you had attained a higher level?
One evening about a year ago I had a glimpse of my own lack of evolved status. I had been enjoying having an opossum visit my yard at dusk, and I had started leaving scraps of food for it and enjoyed watching its surprise and delight in finding what I had left. One evening, a raccoon showed up and began scarfing down the food I had left for the opossum. I had a moment of anger at the raccoon and of regret for the opossum. I also recognized that The All That Is would not make that kind of distinction. The All That Is loves both raccoons and opossums and everything else in creation. Jesus is thought to have said that we are to “love our enemies,” and to do “good to those who persecute us.” I suspect that this concept (which was also shared by Buddha) is one of the things to look for—and perhaps strive for—in the ongoing search for continuing evolution. It may be that we are evolved to the extent that we are capable of loving our enemies.
The Transrational Pyramid is based on Awareness, Clarity, Peace, and—at core—Harmony. This is the eternal view of infinity. The All That Is doesn’t need to take sides because He/She/It sees beyond pain and death to the checks and balances of Eternity. Meanwhile, the rest of us are “stuck” in space and time. We can imagine an “eternal view,” but we have no way to verify the accuracy of our imagination. Are the streets of Heaven really paved with gold? If the eternal part of us is spirit rather than flesh, what purpose would streets—even metaphorical streets—serve? Most human views of the Eternal are based on some sense that life as we know it will continue forever but without the aches and pains associated with having a body. In my opinion, that’s a long way from a transrational view.
It seems to me that our ongoing evolution requires participation in the life that we have now with the goal of having greater awareness, clarity, and peace while contributing what we can to the harmony of the whole. When people shout at each other, whether about interpersonal differences or about social policy, at least for that moment, they have reverted to T-Rex politics.
