8Henry Drummond, (1883, p. 68), Natural Law in the Spiritual World, e-book.
9C.W. Leadbeater, (1912, p. 20), A Textbook of Theosophy, e-book.
10Rudolph Steiner, (1922), An Outline of Occult Science, e-book.
11Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), 244. Fun fact: The priest, Father Telemond, in Morris West's 1963 novel, The Shoes of the Fisherman, was based closely on Teilhard de Chardin. Within that work, the reader will find an excellent and very reader friendly distillation of Teilhard de Chardin's thinking as well as an unfortunately typical reaction from the orthodox theological world.
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133491-1, emphasis added
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20Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man, 223.
Chapter 3:
Evolution Awakens to Itself
…The Spirit of God is aware through activity and we see it in those things celestial, terrestrial, of the air, of all forms…
262-99
That the Unconscious Will of the Universe is growing aware of Itself I believe I may claim as my own idea solely—at which I arrived by reflecting that what has already taken place in a fraction of the whole (i.e. so much of the world has become conscious) is likely to take place in the mass;—and there being no Will outside the mass—that is, the Universe—the whole Will becomes conscious thereby: and ultimately, it is to be hoped, sympathetic.
Thomas Hardy, from his personal correspondence*
Adiverse sampling of evolutionary thought will show that there is one thing upon which most evolutionary thinkers seem to agree: a growing capacity for awareness—or consciousness, as we may also call it—is the product of evolution. Pointing out that every evolutionary advance has resulted in increased consciousness, Christian evolutionist Teilhard de Chardin characterized consciousness as “nothing less than the substance and heart of life in the process of evolution.”21 The Indian sage Sri Aurobindo described the essence of evolution as “the strife of a Consciousness somnambulised in Matter to wake and be free.”22 Similarly, contemporary evolutionary thought leader Barbara Marx Hubbard says that “By understanding evolution as the expression of universal intelligence, now becoming conscious of itself within us, and as us, we overcome the dichotomy between current evolutionists who see no design in evolution, and creationists who often propose an anthropomorphic God as creator.”23 Mystical evolutionist Jakob Boehme anticipated this line of thought roughly four centuries ago when he said that God achieves a new self-awareness by interacting with a creation that is simultaneously part of and distinct from Himself. We find the same concept in the Cayce reading used as the epigraph to this chapter, when it says that “The Spirit of God is aware through activity and we see it in those things celestial, terrestrial, of the air, of all forms.” Ironically, we may find the most poetic expression concerning the birth of consciousness in the cosmos from Carl Sagan, one of America's best-known scientists: “We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins—star stuff pondering the stars!”24
Each of these thought leaders identifies consciousness as the developing edge of evolution, the quality toward which all is moving. Henri Bergson, in his enormously popular Creative Evolution, (English translation, 1910) went so far as to call consciousness not only the product of evolution but its “motive principle,” suggesting that the increase of consciousness may be the ultimate raison d'être for the evolution of the cosmos and all living things within it. The words of Teilhard de Chardin speak to the inseparability of greater consciousness from unfolding evolution when he says, “the history of the living world can be summarized as the elaboration of ever more perfect eyes within a cosmos in which there is always something more to be seen.”25
While it may be axiomatic to any student of metaphysics that consciousness of a sort pervades all that exists, there is, nonetheless, a developmental aspect to consciousness as it manifests in the world of matter. Leading contemporary evolutionary thinker Ken Wilber puts the issue succinctly when he says, “Both humans and rocks are equally Spirit, but only humans can consciously realize that fact, and between the rock and the human lies evolution.”26 Thus we often see language suggesting consciousness “waking up,” as if the vast, underlying ground of all that is (known alternatively as “life” or even “Spirit”) has been a sleeping, unconscious force only now coming into the fullness of its capacity for awareness. Not surprisingly, perhaps, the Cayce readings would concur with the view that sees Spirit-consciousness metaphorically waking up in this world of time and space. For example, one reading suggests that God “gave of Himself” such that “Spirit moving in space becomes matter” and “that in time and in the evolution matter becomes aware of its oneness with the source that gave it energy and activity” in the first place.27 Another reading even seems to have anticipated Sagan's comment about us being “star stuff” when it says that in analyzing our purposes, ideals, and latent urges, we should keep in mind that being part and parcel of the universal consciousness makes us part and parcel of the stars, the planets, the sun, and the moon. “…Do ye rule them or they rule thee?…For ye are as a corpuscle in the body of God; thus a co-creator with Him, in what ye think, in what ye do….”28 Here we come face to face with our responsibility as the carriers of awakened consciousness into the world of matter.
Consciousness: The Current Frontier of the Evolutionary Advance
We stand at a crucial point in a process that has brought matter from its most unconscious to its most conscious manifestation to date. It's not that matter is inert, with consciousness as an overlay or addition that comes only with the more advanced life forms, but rather that consciousness develops in complexity just as the forms of nature, both organic and inorganic, do. “To produce life from inert matter would result in the discovery that there is no ‘inert’ matter, because no life can be produced where life does not exist,” wrote theosophist Harold W. Percival early in the twentieth century. “The forms of manifestation of life may be infinite,” he continues, “but life is present in all forms. If life were not co-incident with matter, matter could not change in form.”29
This view is consistent with that of the Cayce readings, which speak of each cell containing the essence of life in what he often calls the “cell force” or “cellular forces.” While most often the context for such comments is the human body, it is interesting to note that in at least one place it extends to a substance normally thought to be inanimate. When asked about a vision showing a loaf of bread where every cell was illuminated with an aura, the Cayce source answered that this represented “the essence of life itself” in the cell force of the bread.30 Interestingly, it's not only Cayce and the theosophists who had early insights concerning the life force in all of matter. In Natural Law in the Spiritual World we find nineteenth century Christian spokesman Henry Drummond (from whom we heard in the last chapter as well) saying essentially the same thing when he writes, “There being no passage from one Kingdom to another, whether from inorganic to organic, or from organic to spiritual, the intervention of Life is a scientific necessity if a stone or a plant or an animal or a man is to pass from a lower to a higher sphere.”31
Cayce