The Shift

I’ve been thinking further about the exchange begun with the post Cigarettes, Killers and Zen. The idea there is perhaps the most interesting and important one that has come to me over the years, and represents a synthesis of my study of Chinese philosophy and my background in biological sciences. The notion, quite simply, is that the evolution can work on consciousness—an attribute of our structure and function, in precisely the same way it can work on our height, our toes, our lungs, or our teeth—and that such an evolutionary change must happen if we are to survive.

Our form came to be what it is, both mentally and anatomically, as a consequence of the characteristics and pressures of the world around us affecting us through the process of natural selection. We gained opposable thumbs to manage grasping tree branches and then began using it to wield tools (or perhaps it was the other way around. . . .) We gained an upright posture to allow us a better vantage point over the tall grass of the savannah, thereby enhancing our ability to see predators sneaking in and prey sneaking away.

We gained the mental ability for language because it was selected for over time pursuant to the advantage conferred (hunting, warning, survival) to those early members of our tribe who could communicate with each other. The structure, actions and capabilities of our brain have a long history of responding to environmental pressure. Now, in our eleventh hour on Earth, the pressure is mounting for a mental response (one could argue for more clearly physical ones too, perhaps the ability to eat plastic or breathe toxic gases or drink fouled water or survive comfortably in seawater or extremely hot temperatures) that will change our behavior in order to change our environment.

This shift is fascinating, because we have always responded to environmental pressure with genetic response and now, having created our environment ourselves, we have to respond to the changes we ourselves have made in order to survive. Nature, fighting back, has its finger on the doomsday switch I wrote about in The Crocodile and the Crane. As the deep ecologists say, the Earth needs to rid itself of the infection called humanity if it is to survive. The balance of a billion years or more of evolution is now tilting against us because of what we ourselves have done. If we don’t want nature to erase us we must evolve once again.

I believe that evolution will take the form of a shift in consciousness. No mere physical change will be enough. Right now our consciousness leads us—as a species—to kill each other and every other living thing on the planet, to rape and pillage and destroy every resource around us. A shift away from the duality of us-and-them, human-versus-the planet point of view to a caring, awake, sensitive consciousness could change all that, and it could happen within the time span of a single generation. Recently I came across a video about a movie being made around this very shift. There is even mention of evolution. It excites me to see others thinking this way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOzGoz1K3Do&feature=related